Dadding, s2e3: It's been hard work

Posted on 21 April 2020

It’s been nearly a month since the last update, which was not my intention. It’s been hard work, and I haven’t really found time to write anything, because we’ve been so busy just getting through each day. Bringing up children in a lockdown is not easy and we’ve been finding it tough.

Some perspective

I want to prefix all of this with: we are by no means the only people suffering in this pandemic, and we are in many ways very fortunate. Although this post will go into some detail about our difficulties, I don’t for a minute think we are under great hardship in absolute terms.

I’m on shared parental leave, so I have a stable income and I don’t currently have any work obligations. My wife isn’t working. So we have two parents to look after two children. We have a garden, so we have access to outside space whenever we want.

We have good neighbours who we can call on for things – for example, when we were self-isolating we got a neighbour to drop off some paracetamol for us.

Our baby, Robin, was born before the lockdown was announced, so we could have the birth at home and we got all the antenatal checks and things done in time (see previous post).

Juggling two kids with no support

The last few weeks have been really difficult. We’ve mostly been getting through each day as it comes, then going to bed early because we’re both so exhausted, only for it all to start again the next day.

We are suddenly having to look after two children full time without any of the usual support. For our 3-year-old, Luke, we previously had nursery 3 days a week, and a nanny one day; we now have him full time. He’s at an age where he’s very inquisitive and curious, learning a lot about the world, and starting to assert his own identity as well. This makes for some challenging behaviour at times – when he doesn’t get his way, he’s taken to throwing things at us. Overall it’s a fairly high-maintenance life stage: he can’t really be left to play on his own for that much time each day. He really craves interaction with us and needs practical help from us with all sorts of things: playing with his train set, having a bath, getting dressed or undressed, sitting on the potty, etc. That said, we can plug him into CBeebies for half an hour or so at a time when we really need some time to ourselves (say, to go to the toilet or have a shower!)

Luke needs a lot of exercise. We take him out each day, but of course all the playgrounds are sensibly closed, so we’ve had to think about where we go when we go out. Where is responsible (limiting risk of spreading coronavirus), will keep Luke engaged, doesn’t require public transport? The parks are still open, so we do take Luke to parks occasionally, but if he sees another child he knows from nursery or from our neighbourhood he just wants to run over and play with them. He’s just getting to the age where he’s starting to interact meaningfully with other children, and it’s heartbreaking to keep telling him “don’t get too close!” “no touching!” “we can’t share other people’s toys!”

One thing we’ve been doing is taking him out on his balance bike to see the railway line at the top of our road. There’s a gate in the railway fence, set back from the pavement, where we can stand and watch trains, which he loves. However, because it’s still next to the road, you can’t fully switch off as parent.

We’ve also found a park which is in the direct opposite direction to nursery, where we rarely bump into children Luke knows, and where the density of people is generally low enough that Luke can run around without getting within 6 feet of anyone.

For our baby, Robin, the first few weeks of a baby’s life you kind of stay at home most of the time anyway, but we’re now getting to the point where, outside a lockdown, we’d be starting to take him to local groups. Postnatal mum-and-baby yoga was something Sonia really enjoyed from Luke’s baby months (and I even found a dad-and-baby yoga group). The Salvation Army hosted a twice-weekly stay-and-play even where we could have taken both Luke and Robin, Luke can run around in a safe environment without requiring too much supervision, and you can meet other parents and chat and support each other. It’s been hard to let go of what might have been – those support groups would have been invaluable but they’re just not available to us.

On a practical note, we’ve told our cleaner not to come any more (and we offered to keep paying her regardless). Luke generates a lot of mess and we’ve had to take on more of the cleaning ourselves.

Our days are packed. The only time which kind of belongs to ourselves is when the kids are asleep. Luke has an afternoon nap, which means we have an hour or two then (although much of this time we spend clearing up after lunch, tidying his toys away, etc). And Luke’s bedtime has been creeping later and later, so that he might not be settled in bed until 9pm. We ourselves are so tired that we’re usually in bed before 10pm. This means that, on a good day, we might have an hour to ourselves in the afternoon and another hour in the evening, when we’re too tired to do anything.

Too much perspective?

My wife and I do remind each other how lucky we are a lot. I think it is useful to maintain perspective, but I wonder if it’s also been having a negative effect: it’s easy to think “if other people are coping under worse conditions, why are we finding it hard?” This thought is pernicious. It makes our struggles feel like a personal failing, which makes us feel even worse about ourselves.

I’ve been thinking about a section in Robert Webb’s autobiographical How Not To Be a Boy (which is an excellent book and I highly recommend). While he was at university, Webb was suffering mental health issues, and he went to the university counselling service. He made various comments about how his problems were nothing, really, and he probably was wasting the counsellor’s time and other people probably had much bigger problems.

Robert, I get this from students all the time, especially the male students. Yes of course there is always someone worse off than you. But imagine you’re in a doctor’s surgery with a broken arm. The person next to you has two broken arms, the person next to him has two broken arms and a broken leg. This is all very well, but the point is that you have a broken arm and it hurts.

Sonia also found this blog post by Dr Suzanne Zeedyk which we both found helpful. It describes the importance of not trying to be perfect parents; it’s ok to just be good enough parents.