My last two years are probably similar to what most people have experienced. Isolation, mental health roller coasters, new hobbies and time wasted on rabbit holes of mindless content online. I realized the other day that I did not write a single post in 2021. Maybe I was hoping that by not posting I could pretend that the evil twin of 2020 never existed. It wasn’t intentional, I do love writing. At one point I felt that sharing the challenges of being a working mom married to someone in medicine was an experience worth writing about. I found it therapeutic and felt that there was so much to say. I was struggling to find the right balance of wanting to grow in my career while supporting the insanely demanding career of a medical student and resident. Oh, and have kids too. Lots of them.

I had last posted that I was changing my perception of things, and to some degree I did. I lowered my bar. I’m not saying that pessimistically. I lowered it for what I felt was an acceptable reason given the current state of the world. For now, we are working on thriving while surviving. I began giving myself more grace. Are the kids healthy? Yup. Are they managing to not fall behind in school? Yup. Do we still have jobs? Yup. Ok, feels pretty successful to me.

Once I got to that point, I shifted to figuring out what I needed to begin thriving. I started with my mental health and focused on the depression and anxiety I’ve had my entire adult life. Instead of just dealing with it, I began speaking with a therapist and focusing on each piece of the puzzle. After that, I realized I needed something for me, a hobby. I love art but I do not have a dedicated space to paint and draw where little hands will not “assist”. Since I didn’t bake sourdough or get a quarantine pet, I decided to take up crocheting. True to my distractible nature, I have a lot of “works in progress” but have managed to finish a few things. Either way, it’s been a great distraction for me and for the most part, the kids leave it alone and I can take it with me when we’re running all over the place.

In addition to crocheting while surviving, I began digging into our ancestry again. Thankfully a few of hubs family members have records, pictures and stories they’ve shared along the way that I’ve been able to use while building out our family tree on ancestry.com. I was able to find pretty solid information several generations back for almost every branch of our family tree which was a fun distraction. I mean, it’s not pretty looking (I keep telling myself I’ll organize it better when I retire), but it’s made for some cool conversations.

Most notably, was learning about my maternal great-grandpa. For as long as I can remember, we never really talked about him, kind of like Bruno. My grandma never really elaborated about her father, and we knew not to push. All we were ever told was that my great-grandma died in a car accident and then he moved away. My grandma did not learn of his death until years later, but with very limited information. The family lore was that he died on an island somewhere. Having grown up in a small town where our entire family was basically born and raised, that sounded so exotic. I figured it had to be Hawaii or some other US island. My grandma, one of the most risk adverse people I knew, had to have gotten that trait from her parents. Right? Surely there are no adventurous genes in this lineage. Boy, we were in for quite a surprise. It began with an email from a previously unknown distant cousin in Scotland. It took the trajectory of our search halfway around the world and as of now has left us with more questions than answers.

If you need a good distraction during this time, join me and my family as we unravel this mystery through coming blog posts. Maybe 2022 will be the year we figure out who my great-grandpa really was.