Endless Exhaustion

The RV couldn't be delivered until the following Wednesday, so we continued to stay with our hospitable friends. I stopped journaling at this point, swept up in wave after wave of exhaustion. Our days were consumed with tasks. We were no longer living on the farm, but the animals still were. We had 45 layer hens, 23 turkeys, 7 goats, 2 pigs, 2 dogs, a bunny, and a ridiculous number of barn cats. Since it was the heat of summer, keeping all the animals well supplied with water was a constant chore, even under normal circumstances. Now that we were staying 15 minutes away, it became a logistical nightmare. Animals had to be let out in the mornings, and put away in the evenings; and by evening, I mean 10:00pm or later at night, when it was finally growing dark enough that we could gather them back into their overnight enclosures. We stopped by midday on hotter days to replenish the waterers. Every trip to the property now was an extra 30 minute commute (there and back), plus the time it took to actually do the farm chores. Being so physically tied to the home that we had just left was a constant source of emotional pain, no less for the kids than for my husband Aarron and myself. Yet it had to be done.

In the beginning, the novelty of shopping for new clothes and things was briefly exciting and carried the kids through that first hard weekend. As it turned into a daily chore of leaving our friend's house to care for animals and run errands, it quickly lost it's charm, and the kids longed for quiet home days. I ached that we could not provide that yet, and grieved that our days were being driven by emergency. In the end, Aarron and I had to make peace with "doing the best we could". We stayed up at nights, researching and planning, discussing how to handle both the actual mold remediation and saving what we could of our belongings.

I don't have many happy memories of these days. Fear was a constant enemy that I fought with at every turn. It was hard to find consistent information on remediating our personal belongings. I worried that we were contaminating our friend's house, since we still were making do with several things we had brought from the house that we could not replace. Would starting up the laptop blow a cloud of harmful mycotoxins? I had read that it could. If we brought in those tennis shoes, would it contaminate the area? Should I let my son bring that favorite stuffed animal he just got for his birthday two weeks ago? I felt like I was on tightrope, trying to balance between potential health concerns and the physical and emotional limitations of our current situation. It is hard to find a touchstone of reasonableness when you are fighting an invisible enemy that affects people differently, even within your own family.

Could we even make wise decisions in this constant state of exhaustion?