Well yesterday’s post certainly provoked a few reactions.
On the whole they fell into two camps.
The first was from people in the same position as me - mothers of young children who they have been trying to keep amused and/or educate for coming up to a month, all with zero external influence or distraction beyond that viewed on a screen.
They all said things along the lines of ‘I hear you’, ‘I feel exactly the same’, ‘hell yeah’, ‘this was me yesterday’ and, in one case, ‘I nearly kicked my child today’. My closest friends have all confessed to being brought to tears by things their children have said or done, through nothing more than sheer exhaustion and untold frustration, and even friends who are the most wholesome of mothers - the ones I have long envied for their patience and zen-like calm - are telling me they can't stop shouting and are struggling to cope.
The second camp of people are those who don’t have young children, and I really seem to have worried them. Those people have very sweetly tried to offer solutions, suggested things I might be able to do to make things easier, encouraged me to appreciate the positives, or expressed concern for my mental health.
So I thought I should clarify a few key points.
I love my children. We have a lot of fun. We laugh a lot, we are very tactile, and they bring out the kid in me. I burp for Henry’s amusement. I do stupid accents on demand. We have taught them all our favourite songs and we’ll sometimes fall down a rabbit hole of Spotify algorithms, the four of us belting out early Blur, 90s dance anthems, Bananarama or the Foo Fighters at the tops of our voices while Xander just flaps his arms and legs so he looks like he’s dancing.
They bring out the best in me. But they also bring out the worst in me.
Never has anyone spent this much undiluted time with their children. We’ve all done six week summer holidays at home but we’ve been to the park, to the zoo, on playdates, spent nights with friends, with family. Hell, we’ve gone on family outings to the supermarket on quiet days. Even those people who choose to homeschool permanently don’t do so without ever leaving the house.
We have never spent a solid month with absolutely nothing to do. Sure we can watch TV, we can Zoom everyone we know, we can play in the garden and colour and write letters to people and read stories and do Joe Wicks workouts, but there is no getting away from the fact we are together, without anything or anyone else to look at day in, day out.
I am not moaning about my children because I don’t like them, I’m not even really moaning about my children specifically. If we had taken them on a two month-long round the world trip, exploring new countries and cultures, seeing new sights, having adventures and new experiences, I wouldn't be struggling with us being together permanently. But we haven’t.
Children the age that ours are don’t have social awareness. They don’t understand privacy. Or personal space. Or boundaries. They don’t have self control or self discipline and are still learning manners. And - shock horror - that doesn’t make for easy company.
It doesn’t mean they’re not very lovely kids - sweet, funny, affectionate - it just means they’re kids. And as immature as I can be, I need greater mental stimulation than that which they can provide. I can’t sneak off and read a book, watch a film, turn to a hobby. And if I try to talk to an adult I am interrupted or am doing so while cooking tea/changing a nappy/breaking up a wrestling match.
(Disclaimer: Andy is working much of the time now, and when he’s not we have no chance for conversation. We sometimes manage to hang back on the daily walk and speed chat but sooner or later Bella will come off her scooter so we have to abandon that to tend to a grazed knee.)
I will certainly look back on this period with some fondness for all the time we have enjoyed together, but that doesn’t make it easier to live through in the moment. The same way people run a marathon more than once, or have more than one baby, you need time for the painful memories to fade, for the rose-tinted lenses to kick in.
There’s a vast gulf in lockdown experiences between those who are at home with multiple children operating a 14 hour working day, seven days a week, in which they don’t sit down except to eat and wee, and do nothing - and I mean absolutely nothing - for themselves, and then those people who are living alone or with their spouse who are getting twitchy with the boredom and the wasted time. Neither are having a great time. But I can only draw on my own experiences.
And I absolutely know I’m not the only one. I know there’s thousands - millions - of people out there in the same boat. I know there’s millions of people in a different boat - one with more leaks, being battered harder by the same storm.
I’m not asking for solutions or suggestions. I have tried every new approach I can think of to get Henry to concentrate on his school work, to encourage them to play without us, to ease the demands on our time.
But the reality is the children are bored too. They don’t have the language or the awareness to vocalise it but you can see it in their behaviour. They’re increasingly short tempered, unable to focus on anything for very long, playing up for attention in a way they’ve never done before. Bribery no longer works and requests to stop it/behave/sit still/eat up are simply a waste of breath. It’s as if you have not spoken. I’m trying very hard to give them one-on-one time when I can but there are three of them and one of me and that maths doesn’t work.
I’m not depressed, I’m just tired and frustrated. I’m not ungrateful, I’m just struggling to see the silver linings as clearly as I was (many of which I’ve written about in earlier posts). I’m not forgetting how lucky we are, but it’s all relative.
It’s like the Julia Donaldson book A Squash and A Squeeze (I know my audience). If you were to take away one thing we are grateful for - our health, our garden, the sunshine - we would suddenly appreciate that thing a whole lot more. But that’s not how it works. Only those people who are relentlessly optimistic are able to live in a constant state of ‘well, it could be worse!’.
So all you kind souls concerned for my well being, please don’t be. I’ll be fine. I am fine. This will be over soon and I will weep with relief. But in the meantime I will continue to post honest accounts of our experiences because that’s why I set up the blog. To have something to look back on in years to come and remember this time for what it was.
The highs, the lows, and all the shouting in between.
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