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Stressed? Let Me Introduce You to Purrble
The past 18 months or so have been…well, gross. We still have all the usual life hassles like finding missing socks and figuring out how to make dinner not be spaghetti (again). But those usuals seem like small potatoes in the context of thousands of COVID-19 deaths, losing homes and jobs, and being physically cut off from all types of support. Cases of mental health and substance abuse concerns have ballooned from 10 to 40 percent. If ever there were a time when we needed a way to “stay calm and carry on” the way the saying goes, this is it.
Personally, my family has been incredibly fortunate. We have been OK financially, and we didn’t lose any of our loved ones. Yet, we have been navigating having my husband and me both working from home, which can be a little tricky given that he is a tech support specialist and has to have quiet so he can take calls from our bedroom. For the entire 2020–2021 school year, I had to try to write while also overseeing digital school for both of our kids. My son had an especially hard time, largely because we had spent a number of years trying to figure out the needs of his sister, who is on the autism spectrum. Being an extreme extrovert, he took being away from friends the hardest out of all of us. Long story short, we all wanted to blow up, with my son having the shortest fuse.
