The Guilt

This morning's musings/ramblings come from a place of feeling all of the Guilt, all of the time. Like, literally. All. Of. The. Time. So, you know the Guilt of which I speak; when you left the TV on a bit too long, when you couldn't be bothered doing the jigsaw puzzle so you just sort of half-heartedly 'encourage' from the sofa, when you made sandwiches for lunch and dinner. Three days in a row. You know? I was still a newbie at this parenting gig when the pandemic hit - I don't think you get your 'Parenting Badge' till you're a good few years into this journey (Hey, Duggee, can you clear that up for me?). And Pandemic Parenting is just next level shit, isn't it? If getting a fully formed, running around, pulling all the stuff out the cupboards, eating all the things from the fridge, having all the tantrums, two year old human home to all of a sudden keep alive and nurture and, you know, parent, was a baptism by fire, then what in the chuff do we call throwing a pandemic and stay-at-home order into the mix? Hm? What's the name for that perfect shitstorm?? My point is that I still knew very little/nothing about how to do this thing. And then the world made me do it entirely by myself. 

It really has been all about survival. At the start, Chapter 1 if you will, I was still trying to do the things - setting up sand and water play, loads of sensory play, making car tracks on the floor play, building tents, making shit out of cardboard - I really was trying and I know loads of parents who were. But as this continued and still continues, the mental exhaustion, the physical exhaustion, the parenting fatigue, the pandemic fatigue; it is all just too much. And we cannot be bothered. No, I don't want to play trains. No, I don't want to read a book. No, I DEFINITELY do not want to do baking. Or painting. Or cars. Or dressing up. Or dolls. Or any kind of small world, role play, imaginative play. I mean, E playing in the way that he does means that I'm largely excused from some of this...but there is exactly where the Guilt rears its head and mocks me from the back of my brain. While my friend is trying desperately to escape from a game of dragon vets taking a trip to the moon with the entire population of the zoo (I mean, I wouldn't play this game on the principle of animal welfare), the Guilt is slowly eating away at me for not trying to engage E in such a game. Social communication is the biggest area of intervention he will need - learning how to play a game with other humans, that there even are other humans interested in what he's doing, to understand that you can actually interact/have an interest in that interaction and that it's fun. It's huge and it's something there would have been heavy intervention in, had we been in school for the last year. But that is not the case and so everything, as I said previously, has fallen on me. And man alive, have I failed big time in trying to do those things. Because I just cannot. I can't motivate myself to set up the stuff and try to teach him in a way that he'll understand because all of it is just exhausting. And I know I'm not alone in this. I know we are all feeling that lack of motivation. The feeling of just 'make it all stop' or 'send them to school' or 'can someone ELSE just do this thing please?'. The mental exhaustion of being all of the things, all of the time, for SO LONG is far too much. But if we understand this and we know that there are gazillions of other parents feeling the same, why can't we just accept it? What do you do with the Guilt then? 

Having chatted with my gorgeous friend the other night about her burnout and fedupness of the whole thing, I realised that there is still a crazy amount of pressure on us. What I don't know is where it's coming from. I don't think it's just internal pressure. All those 'just sit with your feelings' people can, quite frankly, f off. Same to the 'self-care' people. What in the name of all that is holy on the planet does 'self-care' look like when you're trying to keep other hearts beating in your home, manage the emotions of those other lives, teach them stuff, nurture them, attention them, feed them, play with them, all of the things them. What on Earth does 'self-care' look like then, people? Coz if one more suggestion comes at me in the form of a long, hot bath, I will scream. Loud. And man, I'm loud anyway. My 'bath' is a blow up paddling pool in an inexplicably huge shower space, full of pegs (pegs?!), foam letters, all manner of plastic sea creatures and a Little Tikes car. I shit you not. So baths are out. What else? Read a book, you say? Go for a walk? Exercise? Nice cup of tea? WHAT ABOUT ANY OF THOSE THINGS STOPS MY BRAIN FROM TELLING ME THAT I'M A CRAP PARENT AND SHOULD BE DOING SOMETHING MORE, PLEASE? The 'be kind to yourself' camp are out in full force but they do not exist separately from fact that you are hard wired for Parental Guilt in the Normal Times. And we are still not in the Normal Times. Saying that you should have a break and you then trying to have that break does not, for some torturous reason, stop your head from thinking of the trazillion things that you should be doing instead of having that break. This is not exclusive to being a parent, by the way. It also takes the form of doing more exercise, eating better, losing the quarantine kilos, being better at your job, at keeping the house clean and tidy, at being a better friend/sister/daughter/whatever, of doing self-improvement, learning something new, etc, etc, ETC. It is a relentless, sick, warped carousel of suffering. And I see no way way to make it stop. 

So. I will continue to 'sit with' my feelings of being a failure, of thinking I should be doing more, being more, doing better and being better until someone invents a magic solution for this and gives us all a chuffing break from the relentlessness of being a parent in a pandemic. 

Love xxxx