Love In The Time of Corona

There is nothing like a deadly global pandemic to make you feel like a proper arse for complaining about having to 'endure' three and a half weeks of having no internet. Now it feels like the smallest inconvenience one could possibly imagine.

So here we all are, in this peculiar new 'normal'. I feel like I have been through all the stages of grief trying to come to terms with it all. I was heavily in to denial. I definitely ticked off anger. I spent Friday, the last day of school, in tears. From the moment I woke up, I just couldn't stop myself. The tears fell regardless of the reassurance, the need for me to 'pull myself' together, I couldn't stop them. I cried for normality, I cried for the children not seeing their friends or beloved teachers, for me not seeing my friends, for all of us trying to live and work together as I couldn't see for the life of me how that would work, I cried for the worry about lives, livelihoods, lost opportunities and the lack of control I had over any of it. And then, on Saturday, I awoke ready to accept it all. To isolate, to admit we couldn't go on our longed for trip away in April, that our 17th wedding Anniversary, would pass as the last one, unmarked and uncelebrated. I am not one to panic, so my natural reaction to people panicking is to get cross with them for being so dramatic. I reasoned with my panic buying mother that she was being irrational, I was cross with people who tried to tell me that schools would close 'indefinitely' and I argued that it wasn't worth all the fuss and we all had to get it anyway so we should just jolly well keep calm and carry on. But now, I am here, with 6 children (an extra I will explain in due course) and a husband, within our house and garden, for what could be months and months and months and months to come. 

I am still all over the place with my feelings about this bizarre situation. Even though I have accepted it as the new reality, I'm not always able to keep my thoughts under control. I feel like Rapunzel in the Disney film Tangled, when she finally leaves the tower. I swing from being petrified and worried, to being full of hope and optimism. In my wildest times I envisage the coming months, as the sun begins to shine, like a wonderful version of The Waltons. Except Waltons' Mountain is replaced with a much smaller brick house with a fairly modest sized garden. And there are only 6 children, and John Walton in our version works on a laptop in the study rather than the land. And there are no grandparents. But you get the idea. I imagine a time of togetherness, love, sibling play, outdoor adventures and singing around the campfire. I imagine me teaching them the piano, the violin, reading, writing and extremely basic languages and maths whilst baking wonderfully delicious things for them all to enjoy at meal times as we chat and laugh and bask in the sepia toned glow of our time together. I imagine me helping my dyslexic children advance exponentially with their writing, with my sons realising they are in fact best friends and finding all sorts of fun adventures to enjoy together, with my husband learning to live with us all, 24/7 (which he has only ever managed in very small doses). In my more realistic moments, I realise that when it rains, when we are officially confined to our home with only specified times out to gather food and supplies, the boys will physically fight one another, everyone will always be hungry, there will be a constant worry about screen time, I will shout at all the mess, my husband will shout at all the mess, I will take against him shouting about the exact same thing I shouted about, because he did it differently and louder, and then there will be slammed doors, tears and potentially desperation as nobody can know just how long this will all last.

For now, I am trying to maintain my usual optimism and think of all the good stuff. I shall try and pass these on to help spread my optimism as the weeks roll on and we all get slightly madder and madder. Here we go: 

Reasons To Be Cheerful No. 1. Marie Kondo was WRONG. Never, in the history of my 41 years, have I been more pleased to prove someone wrong. IN YOUR FACE ANTI-HOARDERS. I must have known that one day, we would face a worldwide disaster confining us all to our homes. Because under the roofs of this house and the garage, is more than enough stuff and clutter to keep us entertained indefinitely. Want to know what the older 2 were studying in the last term of year 5? Not a problem. Let me delve in to my pile of stuff people told me I should throw away - et voila! 2 sets of school books from 3 and 5 years ago for me to use. Want to glue stuff? Stick stuff? Roller skate around the kitchen dressed as a peach? (you laugh but this has already happened) not a problem! I have skates for at least 4 children which haven't been touched in years and a dressing up catalogue that has been collected over 15 years. I have old tights, socks, balls of wool and redundant inserts to cushions - anyone for a sock creature or an octopus? I have old clothes the older ones can rip up and repurpose, I have boxes and boxes of lego that have remained unloved, unused and bringing joy to nobody but the dust particles for years on end, but now, that lego will have the last laugh as it emerges victorious in to the light of extreme boredom and desperate home-schooling parents. Old reading books, learning targets from 2012, egg boxes, jam jars, stickers, boxes of cold and flu tablets and abandoned lemsip sachets (filled with paracetamol) etc - all here. I'm WINNING MARIE. I am loving the idea of her sitting at home, with her clear surfaces, empty cupboards and only joyful-bringing clothes feeling the error of her ways. Want a sock puppet Marie? TOUGH. You don't have the stuff you need. Want to know what you were doing on March 20th when you were 15? TOUGH you don't have your Purple Ronnie Diary from 1993 to find out. She who laughs last, laughs longest. Mwa ha ha ha ha. I mean I am still wondering how to fully utilise the odd shoes, broken headphones and weird leads to things I cannot fathom, but I will, don't you worry. To my sister who told me to 'order a skip and empty my house in to it', to my mother, who has bemoaned my hoarding ways (whilst simultaneously being a hoarder herself) I say IN YOUR FACE. And THAT brings me joy Ms Kondo. 

RTBC No. 2. I have spent the longest time wishing I could spend my days in my beloved loungewear, (drinking gin from breakfast through to bedtime but let's not focus on that part yet) and now my greatest wish has come true. I was born for this. My long suffering husband despairs of my wonderful collection of comfy casuals and rightly so. My latest and most loved pair of pink, velour, baggy trousers are the stuff of stylish nightmares. I look like a very badly dressed, rotund, golden girl who has given up on life. But to me, they are pure joy. They are soft. And 'Shnuggly'. And back in the normal days, my greatest desire from the moment I awoke was to get to the part of the day when I could be reunited with them. They are so stroke-able and comfortable it is mind blowing. My youngest grabs on to my leg when I wear them and strokes them and sighs whilst inviting anyone she can to 'stroke mummy'. I could put on 4 stone and they would still fit. And I got them for £4 from a Sale rail in Sainsburys when they had an extra 20% off special. I mean, what is not to love! Combined with any member of my exquisite shnuggly sock collection, they are comfort at its most extreme. Now I don't have to wrench them off to do the second school run in the morning (I almost always wear them to drop the older ones at school first), I can wear them morning, noon and night, safe in the knowledge that nobody will ever surprise me at home and catch me wearing them. What pure delight! 

RTBC No. 3 PE Kits. My second child is a slightly (very) disorganised boy who has a penchant for losing things. Superdry/Topshop coats, phones, water bottles, phone chargers and PE Kits top his list of preferred items to lose. By the time it got to the 3rd PE Kit which has to be purchased from a specific shop in town at a cost of £24 a time, I decided that there would only be one PE kit going forward and that he and his sister would share it. I cannot tell you the number of mornings this rash decision caused drama, anger and at times, physical fights. However for the forseeable future, worrying about who had the PE kit last and whether its smell would be noticeable enough to worry about, is a thing of the past. HUZZAH! From now on, we have Joe Wicks at 9am every morning, online ballet classes a go go thanks to all the girls and one boy's classes now being 'remote' and we can do it all, wearing whatever we want. BLISS.

I am also cheerful that today is mother's day, because for the first time in what could be years, I got to stay in bed and fall back to sleep until a mammoth 10am. This hasn't happened, well, ever I think. So I am feeling discombobulated from the extra sleep and the weird 'it's Sunday but nobody is leaving tomorrow' feeling but also thankful that I have enjoyed a 'proper' mother's day of rest, chocolates and being able to sit and write. So, to all the mothers/mother figures and just all round wonderful women - past, present and future - let's all be kind to ourselves and sit back in our ugly velour comfy trousers and eat our Lindt chocolate whilst we make our way through every Neflix series that has ever been invented and gradually learn to hate our optimistic home schooling timetables we drew up in the early days of isolation thinking we had it 'sorted'. I say, as long as we all survive and Marie admits she was wrong, that is plenty good enough.