Here’s where I am today, without any BS: I’m a rubbish mother, a rubbish teacher, a rubbish cleaner, a rubbish washerwoman, a rubbish therapist, a rubbish cook and a rubbish shopper. My ideas are rubbish, I look rubbish, I’m a rubbish partner and a rubbish human.
I’m rubbish at all of it and why? Perhaps it is because I’m trying to DO all of it. I’m also rubbish at giving myself a break, so that’s a ‘meaningless platitude’. I threw it in because I knew I should.
Anyway, now I’ve got that off my chest I should mention that I am an adoptive parent of two, 8 weeks into lock down. At first, I was horrified by it, then I revelled in it and now I’m sick of it. But. I don’t want to go back to normal.
Why is that? What is that all about? I feel like a child, one of our children, because I just can’t express the fear, the trauma, the dread.
I guess that if, I could draw, I’d draw a giant behind bars. The giant usually looms over us, operating us like puppets on strings. This puppet goes to work. This one has a good day at school. This one hits. This one sits in the corner. And so on.
But the giant has been put behind bars. He can’t pull the strings anymore. He is the streets and schools and workplaces, shut down. For eight weeks we have manfully, womanfully, childfully danced away without him, trying to do it right. Some of us have just collapsed. Some have found that they’re better without the strings. It’s a spectrum.
I tried to be the giant for our family. I provided a timetable and did proper teaching and fun lessons and fitness and praise and shouting and the whole shebang and look where it got me. See first paragraph. I don’t regret it, because we needed something to transition to this new string-free show we are performing. But I feel like I’m done.
But I do not want that giant to be unleashed again. Oh no. I am done with him, too.
I got back from my ‘me time’ (read, losing it) walk earlier to find my children in next door’s back garden hitting each other with sticks. I’d have been really angry about it 8 weeks ago. It wouldn’t have fit with what we are supposed to do, according to that giant. But what could be more natural and wonderful, really, than sneaking over a wall into the jungle next door and fighting with sticks?
I think we might like being free…
Let’s have going forward, not going back. Thoughts on how, exactly, we do that are still forming.
