never mind I discovered a window that had multiple tabs and one of the tabs had the "restore session" screen.

I just hadn't found it yet cuz I opened a few new windows upon accessing my computer after update and started working on something else right away... then realized "hey wheres all my windows" and eventually went through window by window, tab by tab and found the important one.

Hope this can help someone else down the line though cuz i was STRESSED OVER LOOSING THEM ALL. So much work on there.

Note that on Mac closing Firefox can be more complicated because you can close all open windows, but keep Firefox running with the menu bar visible or minimized in the Doc.

Make sure you Quit/Close Firefox with all windows still open. Otherwise you can check "History -> Restore Previous Session" and "History -> Recently Closed Tabs/Windows".