A day in the life of a mom during Covid-19



An honest, harsh, but hopeful account

A day in the life of a mom during Covid 19


In less than a month, we will enter Year Two of Covid-19. While a vaccine is on its way, and experts predict that most of the (willing) population will be inoculated by late spring/early summer 2021, families are still in the thick of it. Has spring/summer ever seemed so far away? With the recent extreme spike in nationwide cases, many kids are once again remote learning, and parents are shifting gears back to the juggling act of parenting and educating their kids, themselves adjusting to a radically different lifestyle, with disappointments and lowered expectations.

In a letting-it-all-hang-out, brutally honest post for Popsugar, Lucy Wigley, mom of a six-year-old and a seven-year-old, details her attempts to be the parent she wants to be, and, candidly, refreshingly, reveals her frequent failures, her sense of fatigue, but also an underlying sense of purpose and even a glimmer or two of hope.

Rather than give tips on how to remedy her sons’ bad behavior, or her own questionable choices (mainly caving a lot more than she’d like), Wigley, who went from stay-at-home-mom to business owner and now, back to SAHM, gives details that will make many tired, dispirited parents feel heard and seen. And she’ll even valiantly offer up a chuckle or two:

“6 AM: Our eldest comes in to wake us (me) up. He will either do this by standing right next to me and staring at me like a serial killer, or gently stroking my leg so that I think that a spider is running across it. Today, it's the spider, and I bite back swear words whilst in deep sleep delirium. I hope that my husband will offer to take him downstairs so that I can go back to sleep. He doesn't.”

READ MORE: Too easygoing in the pandemic?

The in-depth detail she offers will be familiar to many. Much of it revolves around food, and Wigley’s sons’ insatiable appetites. Also their iPads. And her gnawing guilt, which, ironically, she stifles by doing stuff constantly.

But exasperating as her day often is, Wigley is soldiering through, and, at the end of it, while soothing her eldest after a nightmare, she writes: “I reflect on what went well during the day, and try to forget what didn't. I remember that my children need me more than ever, and although things aren't perfect, they never will be, and I'm doing the best that I possibly can, under very restricted circumstances. I hope that tomorrow will be better, and remind myself not to dissolve into a ball of anxiety if it isn't — what really matters is that we are all still healthy, and still have each other and everyone that we love in our lives.”



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