I’m pretty sure that when God came up with the day of rest He wasn’t in lockdown with three under-7s. Never mind Sundays, I haven’t had a day of rest for five long weeks. And I wouldn’t examine the preceding six and a half years too closely either now I come to think of it.
There's a book my big kids have both loved called Five Minutes' Peace, in which Mrs Large the elephant sneaks off for a bath to get "five minutes' peace from you lot". By the end she achieves 3m45s peace and I regularly find myself wondering what she's complaining about. That sounds like bliss.
The trouble with spending five days a week home-schooling is there’s very little time for getting anything else done. The cycle of cooking means the only housework I achieve is kitchen-based, and even then the output is limited.
Oh and I’ve done a lot of laundry. (A friend once hit the nail on the head when identifying the point at which you know you’ve become kind of boring: When the weather’s good you think ‘Ooh I can get a wash out’, when it’s bad you think ‘Ooh the garden will like this’.)
The nice weather just means there’s a steady stream of wet and grassy footprints through the kitchen (into the hall and up the stairs), the bathroom is grimy, the carpets filthy and the kids’ bedrooms strewn with the debris of two bored primary schoolers.
I am on an entirely selfish quest to teach the children an iota of independence. (Which simply means I am trying to expand the list of things they are capable of achieving without me having to stop what I’m doing at that exact moment to assist.) The frustration of them needing you to get them an apple just as you’re hoovering the stairs, when earlier in the day they have constructed a very complicated and potentially lethal structure that enabled them to reach seven feet up from the ground to where the chocolate is kept. Chocolate they can do, fruit needs to be hand delivered.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve nearly tripped over someone who has decided the best place to play is in the corridor between hob and fridge, just as I’m preparing a meal. On Saturday Bella set up camp in our bathroom as I was cleaning it. I went to step over her, smashed my little toe into the corner of the shower tray, nearly fell over and ended up kneeing her (gently) in the forehead. (She wasn’t injured, put down the phone.)
It’s not just being confined to the house for weeks on end that is trying. After all, plenty of people are coping reasonably with the limited space (if not the boredom) quite well. No, for me the struggle is the claustrophobia of never ever having any personal space.
A few weeks ago I shut myself in our bedroom and sat against the door. It lasted less than 30 seconds before one of them was trying the handle and asking what I was doing.
All these emotional commentaries that are doing the rounds on social media, romantically announcing that ‘your children will look back and remember not what they did but how they felt during this time’, can get lost, quite frankly.
I cannot spend 12 hours a day, 7 days a week making dens, baking cakes, creating forts out of cardboard and sellotape or blowing up and filling the paddling pool. And then clearing up the mess half an hour later because none of those things will amuse them after I have walked away. A friend told me last week that after endless badgering she’d boiled 15 kettles of water to warm up the paddling pool only for the kids to play in it for 4 minutes before going off to do something else.
That is exactly the stage we’re at. They are bored. Bored of all the free play. Bored of being at home. Bored of their toys, us and each other.
All of us need the school work that the working week brings. Just as they say kids thrive on structure, we all need something compulsory to pass the time. Without those assignments dictated by someone they revere, I would simply be facing day 36 of threatening to throw away the toys they never play with or threatening to throw away the tablets to which they are becoming addicted.
And the people who say don’t worry about home-schooling, just play, clearly didn’t have the same email from the head over the weekend as we did which pointed out that school reports this year will reference the “amount/quality of work that your child has been able to complete during this period of Home Leaning”. So that’s endless rainbow paintings, identifying wild flowers and learning to sew out the window then. Dammit.
For me the weekend didn’t involve a nice period of relaxation while the children sat quietly making daisy chains and writing letters to their friends, colouring in pictures and looking at story books. It involved emptying the hoover AGAIN, cursing when I realised the (full) paddling pool was over the hole the washing line goes in, and listening in resigned silence to Bella refuse point blank to eat the third hot meal in a row that I had prepared.
So Sunday was much like Saturday. And will be the same as Monday. Day of rest my arse.
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