Anyone else feeling this at the moment?

I feel like one minute I’m totally in control, feeling grateful for the pause, enjoying
the enforced family time, and the next I wake up a gibbering wreck. And I can’t
fathom why I’m so up and down… but then I guess that is part of this crazy
tumultuous time – it is like NOTHING we have ever experienced, so our reactions are
going to be the same.

So I guess it is the same for our Mini kids – they are so super resilient and I spend a
lot of time thinking mine are totally ok! Enjoying having two parents home at the
same time, which is something that is very rare in our house, enjoying not having the
usual daily grind, but then they too this week have had days where they haven’t
wanted to get off the sofa, or out of their pjs… and I think that definitely there are
some days where the world is feeling a bit overwhelming for them too.

But what is normal for them is the feeling of an unknown emotion. So much of how
children behave is down to how their emotions are rolling… it takes a long time to
‘learn’ that a certain emotion is making you behave in a certain way – I mean there
are many days where I still don’t know this! But I think often as adults we are quick
to judge a child with our own grown up, developed, emotional understanding, when
perhaps the emotion is just too big and unknown for them in that moment and they
react in a way which we perceive as annoying, disruptive or bad.

Maybe now, with this totally unknown time, it gives us a greater understanding of
that. Well for me it does, one moment I am happy Mummy dancing around the
kitchen enjoying their company, and the next, without any obvious prompting, I am
shouty Mum, telling them to stop calling my name and just sit quietly! In hindsight
my emotions are bubbling so close below the surface… emotions I’ve not had to deal
with before… well not to this extent anyway and the trick for me, perhaps lots of us,
is to figure out how to cope with this. Perhaps our Confi-kids can teach us?

And by cope, I don’t mean wish that emotion away – just as I wouldn’t want to tell a
child that the emotion they are feeling isn’t relevant or isn’t important, I/WE need to
understand that that isn’t going to work for me either. So how am I dealing with it
(and I know I have to deal with it or learn to cope with it, otherwise I am not going
to be the calm/balanced parent I feel I need to be right now!) Well that is still a
work in progress… everywhere on social media I am reading that I need to have ‘self-
care time’, but in reality, in my days at the moment that feels hard to find. And what
is ‘self care time’ for me? Usually its nipping away for an hour to have my nails made
pretty… can’t do that?!? So my aim this week is to find that peace, somehow. I’ve
started moving more – not a huge amount, but a couple of times a day I have been
doing a quick 10 min HIIT workout – that actually gets my happy endorphins
pumping and so far seems to be helping.

I don’t for one second believe I am going to be a calm Supermum all the time. I have
never been this and I am pretty certain that quarantine for 3 weeks with 3 children
and a husband is not going to lead me to it, but I hope that I can reach a point where
scary Mum is less.

I think at the end of the day, we need to remember that this is a WIDLY UNUSUAL
time – in fact it is like make believe isn’t it. I often have my biggest wobbles when I
look at the window, for one minute I am enjoying the peace, looking at the blossoms
waiting to bloom (Spring is my favourite season!), and the next I am overcome with
emotion at the bizarreness of the situation – the emptiness of our usually busy
world, like something out of an apocalypse film, and then the thoughts overtake me.
I’ve got better at not letting this last very long – my trick in those moments is to find
something else to do which takes me out of my brain – usually I am shaken out of it
seconds later by a shouting child demanding my time and focus. Life really is a
Rollercoaster, and I guess as Ronan said ‘we just have to ride it’

So focus on those babies and how simple life can be if we let it – give them your
thoughts rather than this scary world and hopefully we are all going to come out of
this unscathed!

I read this quote by Matt Haig today and thought it apt…

‘These are not normal times so don’t have normal expectations of yourself. Don’t beat yourself up over how you work from home or homeschool. WE are in the middle of a global crisis. Allow yourself to just exist rather than achieve.’