Plus, my husband is cleaning the gutters and the house is a mess. I should clean up. I should also do some work while everyone is outside. But I feel like if I don’t sit down right this minute I will either collapse or burst into tears. I used to get mad, yell at the kids or my husband, but I’m too tired to yell these days. I just shrug my shoulders now, detach, and that scares me a little.

I’ve read that this pandemic is a collective trauma, and this explains why so many of us feel overwhelmed and scattered. Most days, on good days,  I believe this. But there are days like today where I feel like I’m the only one — the only one tired, the only one spinning in circles, the only scared, the only one putting their once pressing passion projects on indefinite hold in order to do the barest minimum to keep my family’s train on its tracks.

I used to stay at home during the week and work nights on the weekend as an ICU nurse. But for the last few years, I’ve been a stay at home mom with very flexible freelance writing work. So this past fall, when the youngest of my four kids started kindergarten, I was thrilled to have some extended time to myself for the first time in thirteen years. I started plugging away at a manuscript and began a book proposal.

But all that seems so far away right now. Like a dream. Another life. A joke almost.

This shouldn’t sound like such a burden — taking care of my kids while my husband works behind a closed door in our basement office — but it is. This was supposed to be the year I could finally accomplish something for me. Now, I’m just trying to get through it.

I already had my diagnosis when my kids stopped school suddenly in March. And they seem to be doing okay. My husband and I keep checking in with them. “It’s normal now,” my teenager says, nearly seven weeks after their last day. Their school, in one of the largest school systems in the nation, took over five weeks to get their IT and learning platforms up to speed. (There was a scathing Washington Post article about their failures). But I didn’t care. The last thing I wanted to do before and after a breast cancer surgery was have to monitor four virtual classrooms.

Before my kids school figured out their issues, before I found out the hospitals would indefinitely postpone all elective surgeries, allowing my surgical date to be moved up, the kids did whatever they wanted that wasn’t dangerous or involved me. I stayed glued to my phone. I would watch the press briefings, rotate through articles from the NYT, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, the Atlantic, then go visit Facebook and see what people were saying there. Then I’d start the cycle all over again. It felt like if I could just know enough, I’d be able to handle all of this.

Then after my surgery, I ignored the news, social media, my conservative christian friends — I did nothing except the precious work of resting and restoring my body to health. It’s like I could only pay attention to the pandemic or my cancer.

But not anymore.

Neither has resolved.

Earlier this week, I sat on the floor of my bedroom in grey pajamas, leaning against a dresser in a virtual waiting room. It’s not comfortable, but it’s the only spot in the house with a good wifi signal, good lighting, and is behind a locked door. In this telemedicine appointment, I consulted with a medical oncologist who went over my pathology reports and recommended a double mastectomy.

My neighbor’s father died of Covid-19. One of my friend’s husbands lost his job in the second week of the shut-downs. I am losing my breasts. The stories don’t end there.

I walk through my days weighed down with what’s happening in the big world and what’s going to happen in our immediate world. I carry the unknown of the pandemic in the middle of all the rest of the unknown with my health.

Every day, I face mortality two fold.