My children need a break from me. I mean imagine being stuck in a house with a woman who cries with frustration faced with technology she has never had to use for work before, and who thinks a dinner of just broccoli and lentils is something which should not be made illegal.
I need to explain the lentil thing. Stand by while I take you through the minutiae of my domestic woes in the middle of a global catastrophe; My freezer needs defrosting. That’s right. I did not have the sense to sort things like that out before lockdown and now I have Narnia in the corner of my kitchen.
Like most people I had packed it chockful before life as we knew changed. I cannot restock it until every last morsel has been consumed and I’d batch-cooked lentil dishes at the start of lockdown.
I imagine some readers will be thinking “is she really using her massively privileged platform, a national newspaper column no less, to witter on about the contents of her fridge freezer?” Why yes reader, I am.
Anxiety is a rollercoaster which has re-appeared for me in the last few days and it is never really about the fridge-freezer. It’s the feelings it bring up about how up to this job of steering our little family through this. How scared I am that I will get ill and my children will have live off dry cereal and freezer-snow.
Even in the best of times, I am plagued with the worry of whether or not I’m doing things “right” by them, if I’m making their childhood fun enough, nourishing enough. I don’t have a partner to reassure me or at least have an argument with me to take my mind off things.
Before all this, my own mum was the person who soothes my motherly concerns but I have two cats and she has read on the internet that they can carry Covid-19. She may as well have read ‘Cats Will Murder Your Grandchildren In The Dead Of The Night’ on the front page of Time magazine. I worry more about my mother’s screentime than I do about my children’s.
My son and daughter both have all the same needs as before, love, comfort, food and Minecraft. They have not changed. They are taking all of this in their stride. I am too, up to a point but even 12 years on from when I became a mother, I sometimes stop in my tracks and the reality of “OH MY GOD I’M AN ACTUAL PAREN” smacks me in the face like a giant piece of Lego. I mean it’s a huge deal right? It’s up to me to make the childhoods of two human beings – who I would die for – happy and set them up to be independent of me. Yet, at the same time wishing they were babies forever.
In the anxiety zones of lockdown, it’s hard not to imagine everybody else is doing it better. I see other parents with their children, all jogging together. I suggest to my son that we should do the same, he gives me a look that could freeze the Sahara.
I need to run to keep myself sane so off I dragged them, to be one of “those” families. We have one hour of government sanctioned time outdoors so we had to take the dog. The dog spotted a squirrel and bounded in it’s direction so pulled me to the ground. As I got up, she bounced up and down, imagining squirrels everywhere, while I was entangled in her lead. My six-year-old daughter helpfully chose that moment to throw a tennis ball she had found into some bushes. The dog chased it, and down I went again.
Meanwhile, my son pegged it round the park on his own, then reunited with his flustered mum and overexcited dog said “Right. Can we go now?” Off I limped, with my children and dog in tow, past the “Cycling families” and the “running families” and the “We had the sense to get a frost-free freezer families” to make lentil sandwiches for lunch.
