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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