School’s back. Sort of. Transition from break to back has been a bit of a challenge due to the lack of uniform, school bag, leaving the house — the usual lockdown obstacles.
But we’re still trying our best to make learning fun and our morning routine now consists of lounging around watching PE with Joe as if it’s a sitcom instead of a live demonstration of activities you can actually do while standing up. When I search for it on the TV our three-year-old says: “Not PE with Joe again.” She loves it really.
I’ll tell you something, though, I’ve stopped wondering how he keeps his room so neat (we all know what’s behind the camera don’t we?) and have switched to needing to discover the colour of paint on the walls. It’s very calming. I could do with some calm. Home improvement shows are definitely my happy place just now.
Three-year-old looked at me in a very concerned manner the other day and asked: “Mama, do you miss your work?”
Now, I have to be very careful how I answer this question because… well that’s obvious – but of course I do! I miss lots of things about “normal” life or “old” life, or whatever people are calling their pre-lockdown existence.
I do miss proper face-to-face conversations with other grown up people (apart from Daddy, of course). At home, conversations tend to take the form of questions or complaints.
Things I am asked repetitively include: “What are you doing?” or “Is it breakfast/ snack/lunch/tea time yet?”
An example of an “issue” being communicated can be demonstrated in our threenager’s recent reaction to trying her father’s muesli:
“What is this?”
“It’s a piece of nut.”
“I don’t like nuts.”
“Try it – you’ll like it.”
“I am not a squirrel. I am a children.”
She argues a good point.
I also find myself asking lots of questions. But they tend to be the same ones. Just put me on repeat in the background, because I will never get an answer. If you’d told me a decade ago the kind of things I would be uttering, I am sure I would have laughed in your face. You may be unsurprised to discover my sense of humour has also changed in these intervening years. Give me a choice between a rant or a good laugh and I will happily choose the former.
Now vitally important are queries such as: where are your slippers? When did you last go to the toilet? Where is the television remote control? Oh, and where have all my coasters gone? Because, isn’t it annoying when you’ve just made a cup of tea after the kids have gone to bed, you sit down and… no, they’ve vanished again. And I can’t turn on the television either.
But the biggest conundrum of all: why does the living room look like it’s been ransacked? Because it does. All the time. I pretend I don’t see it any more.
Although it can be intense spending the whole day together, being with the little ones in lockdown has allowed us to slow down, too. In the past, when we’ve been running ourselves ragged with school and nursery and work and clubs and parties and trips I have sometimes wished I could just press pause and be temporarily rid of all the things we feel we must do. Just for a breather. And now it has happened.
Yet, I still feel some days that perhaps we haven’t done enough or that I haven’t entertained them well. There’s a sadness that all they have come to know so far has been swept away in place of a much smaller life. But they’re still happy (well, most of the time).
And while they have the uncanny ability to drive you crackers, they do also ground you in the present. There’s little time to check in on the news and discover what grim developments happen to be unfolding while demands are being made for the next snack. In this new, concentrated existence, more than ever, they are your world.
