10 Feb 2021, 02:17

Oh lord yes this is hard times. Thank you for posting this thread. I have huge respect for all of you who are parenting through this, and while I'm not in that same boat, I'm in the same ocean. My mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's this summer, and I've been trying to help my mom cope and grieve and my dad and sisters and I transition to a caretaking role, mostly via Facetime from 8 hours away, plus monthly road trips with isolation periods on both sides. It's been grueling, and so sad. At the same time, for about 4 months my fiance and I gained a new housemate in the form of a old colleague who got stranded by the pandemic and couldn't fly home to Shanghai. My main coping mechanism has always been my work, scenic art, which was physically demanding, absorbing, and creative. But I haven't worked since March, so my fiance and I canceled our September wedding, which is for the best because he just lost his job in December in a surprise downsize. So now we're both unemployed, and struggling to find optimism in all of it. It's been rough.
In addition to information and advice and inspiration, what I really need now is some regular sense of community in my life, and I'm happy to find some pieces of that here on this forum.