Chapter Twenty-Four: The Govfurnace
April 27, 2021
Dear Diary,
Today is April 27 and both children are finally back in school five days a week. The significance of this particular day is not lost on me, as it was over a year ago - March 12, 2020, to be exact - that I received an email from the school informing me that they were transitioning to distance learning, but hoped to return to in-person learning on April 27, 2020. Well, they were right about the day, just off by a year.
Who could have predicted that this would have gone on for so long?
It certainly hasn’t been an easy ride, Diary. There was a period of time, earlier in the school year, in which I foolishly convinced myself that my role as Governess could be accomplished by simply randomly barging into the children’s rooms to see if they were doing what they were supposed to be doing. I guess I wasn’t as stealth as I thought I was, because several weeks elapsed where I thought things were going really well, and then suddenly one day back in January, I started to receive various emails from the children’s teachers alerting me to the fact that they were not participating in school. The teachers all encouraged us to have a conversation with the children, as though this problem stemmed from some sort of verbal miscommunication of expectations. If only our children were so easy. Alas, they are not.
So, since January, I’ve been back to full-time governessing. We moved mistress Olivia into our family room where we cast her Zoom feed onto our television screen, and I have been able to serve as Olivia’s classroom attendant. What is a classroom attendant, Diary? A classroom attendant is someone who: (1) actually listens to what the teacher is saying; (2) grabs whatever materials are required as per what the teacher is saying; (3) repeatedly reminds the student to pay attention and stay seated (unless it’s PE and then the classroom attendant works up a sweat alongside her pupil); (4) provides various snacks and refreshments throughout the day; and (5) attempts to mask her resentment that the majority of her day is now taken up by this.
Now that it’s over, I wish I could say that I enjoyed this time, but then I would be a liar. No, it has not been easy to give up my entire life for nearly a year to sit next to my kid doing Zoom school for seven hours a day and then cram all of my regular responsibilities into the remaining hours of the day. Tack on all the extra cooking and cleaning, and moving homes in the midst of it all, and it’s fair to say that it’s been really exhausting and the Governess has been pretty cranky as of late.
Since Instagram can apparently read my mood better than anybody, I started to see all these posts about self-care and taking time for myself and so I did what anybody would do. I bought myself the Infrared Sauna Blanket which Instagram repeatedly advertised to me. It’s basically a sleeping bag, which kinda resembles the lead blanket they give you at the dentist, and which heats up to incredible temperatures. Hubby calls it my heat burrito, and as someone who really loves burritos, I am not mad at the nickname. Every night before bed, I pull it out and do an hour infrared sauna session in the comfort of my own family room. It gives me a good sweat, causes me to drink a lot of water, and has provided me with some of the best sleep I have had in decades. I feel like I am sleeping so deeply and I don’t wake up nearly so often as I did during the tumultuous Trump-tweeting years.
So, there you have it! With the kids back in school full-time, the Governess is turning into a Govfurnace instead.
Very truly yours,
Maya