Are you working from home?
If you are in a job which enables you to work from home, I am sure you are now juggling the world of work and your children under your feet.
It depends on their age of course, and varying needs will impact the amount of attention you need to give. If your child is young, and I wont put an age on it, you may find yourself using screen time WAY too much and trying to ssshhh your child when you are on a conference call. If your children are older you are probably being busted for failing to understand their homework. I seem to recall trying to help with long multiplication years back with my older daughters only to find they carry to the bottom NOT the top! I was horrified. That may mean nothing to you, but the point is, things are taught differently in some areas, and there I was thinking I was REALLY clever because I could help. How wrong was I? It ended up being an argument, and I stepped back feeling like a numpty!
I now have a 17 year old, 15 year old and a 4 year old. I have NO idea how to do their GCSE and A Level work and for my 4 year old I feel like I am needing to take a deep breath constantly as he wants to be by my side at every opportunity. That may sound like a ‘nice’ thing for someone who is used to being in the office, alas no. I am not ashamed to admit part of the reason I go to work is to have a break from mini people. That way when I do come home from work and I have heard the word Mummy 45 times in 1 hour, its a novelty. It is NOT novelty every hour, every day in a house that we can’t leave. Oh except for the daily walk which is a must, and that has nothing to do with the fact we have a dog. We live in London and the park is quiet, yet I would still like to give a lesson to people on what 2 meters looks like. I think that is another blog entirely….
Back to working from home with a house full of kids. My youngest is too young to understand that I am on a call, and I have no idea how to push my older girls to log onto their complex online learning systems. Their tech abilities are way better than mine and we are ALL learning new ways of working. they are navigating it but the enthusiasm is obviously waning and we are only in week 1.
This is bit sh*t for all of us. We are all in new un-chartered territory and it’s no fun for anyone. All I would say is I have been on multiple conference calls as day and regularly see a camera go off for a potty situation, a baby appear in the camera window screaming, while the parent frantically mutes and people missing conference calls because quite frankly, there is just too much going on. We all need to cut each other some slack and understand this isn’t our ‘normal’. We are juggling as best we can. And that’s all you can do. Just do your best. As a mother, in your job and in your home.