Please don’t ask me when I’ll see Tim again. It hurts my heart.
This is definitely not how I imagined my marriage going. Being a widowed person, remarried, I had high hopes of living with my new husband. Finally getting to do the day-to-day things I had been missing after Steve died.
I was tired of being a solo parent. I was tired of making all the decisions. I was tired of taking care of the house. Being the only one to take the garbage out. The only one to empty the dishwasher.
Marrying Tim gave me hope of things to come.
We knew we wouldn’t be able to live together right away because he lives in the US and I live in Canada. We were working out immigration plans to be together.
But this big thing called the global pandemic got in the way.
My hopes were delayed again.
I feel like I’ve been living in this limbo for 5.5 years since Steve died. The map of the life I imagined got ripped apart.
I know you get this to some degree. The pandemic has changed the map of your life too. The plans you made, the things you were going to do, the people you were going to visit. It’s changed everything.
For me, I don’t know when I will see my husband again. We’ve been fortunate to have seen each other a handful of times over the last year. But it pales in comparison to the plans we had and how often we saw each other before March 2020.
Thank you for caring and wanting to know when we’ll see each other again. Thank you for being concerned. Thank you for feeling compassion for our difficult and unusual situation. I appreciate that.
For now, we are living a long-distance marriage across a closed border with quarantine restrictions, Covid tests, and uncertainty.
For now, we connect through FaceTime, Zoom, and phone dates.
For now, we will both try to live in the moment, enjoy the time with our kids, and not let this moment pass us by. Because one day we will live together and have moments of being sick of each other. But I can’t imagine those days right now.
Whitney
