Over the weekend, my youngest daughter’s daycare provider sent the dreaded COVID positive email. This cascaded into notifications for quite a few families across at least three different classrooms of close contacts and instructions to self-isolate for ten days and test. Cue that familiar sense of impending doom and amped up anxiety.
If you don’t already know from personal experience, it is nearly impossible to get any sort of quality work done when you have your young kids at home. Moreover, it’s not 2020 anymore, employers aren’t as willing to exercise compassion for low levels of productivity due to also being your child or children’s primary caregiver during the work day (actually, it’s a 24 hours a day kind of thing). The only chance at being able to get more than a few minutes of uninterrupted time to work is if you allow your child to be entertained in front of a screen. In that moment, screen-time is your only saving grace, it can feel miraculous and life-saving. But then, very quickly, your child can become pretty addicted to the tv or the iPad and it creates other problems and struggles later on down the line when you try to set limits. You regret your moments of “weakness” and blame yourself for taking the easy way out, even though, at the time, your mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing felt on the brink of disaster.
It is this psychotic merry-go-round of self-blame, intense external pressure, unending levels of stress, constant risk assessment in a continuously changing world, and the resulting feelings of profound inadequacy that so many parents are experiencing. In some ways, it feels even worse because there are clear segments of the population who have, in many ways, moved on to post-pandemic life secure in their boosters and vaccinated older children.
Parents of kids under 5 (and over 5): You're not crazy, you're not inadequate, you're not whining. After almost two years of this insanity, there is nothing left in the reserves. Trying to work and parent at the same time (forget about being a partner, a friend, a family member, or even being kind to yourself), is impossible within the structures we live in and yet, we keep doing it. Never has the phrase, "squeezing blood from a stone," felt more appropriate and nearly literal. As I've said over and over to clients, you'll do it because you have to, but it comes at a cost. The world may not respect that cost, but you should at least respect it of yourselves.
If this resonates for you, ugh, I’m so sorry. You’re not alone. I hear your silent screams and validate just how effed up the situation is. Nothing you can read here will change the pressure you’re under, but at least, I hope, you feel seen, heard, and understood.
Keep breathing folks. We will get through this. I promise.
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