Lockdown Fatigue

The first lockdown was a break, bringing the onslaught of Life to a temporary standstill just as we hit the first gloriously warm spell of the year. The children were in the same class at school and did most of their homeschooling together. The rest of the day was ours to spend as we wanted.

The second lockdown almost seemed to pass us by. The schools (and many other businesses) stayed open and I had just started my placement for my postgrad. All three of us left the house every day, interacted with other people and learned new things--save for the two week blip when my son had to self-isolate, but we managed to adapt.

This third lockdown has been harder.

The children are at two different schools with very different homeschooling systems. My son has to log into the relevant classroom for every period, while my daughter requires a fair amount of attention if she's to do her work properly. While the schools are more prepared for homeschooling now, teachers are still struggling to teach via a medium they've not been trained for and one that renders almost all their training invalid. They can't engage their students with hands on activities or group projects. School is, inevitably, boring.

The weather's terrible too and with the government finally getting firmer about travel restrictions, we're reluctant to venture too far afield. But it's hard to muster interest for the umpteenth visit to the beach in the wind and rain, or for a walk through rain and mud. Even when I dredge up the motivation to drag the kids out, at least one of them will be groaning the whole time, and then I start snapping. Fresh air and exercise are no relief.

It's taken a toll on our mental health. At first, I assumed I was doing all right, because I was staying productive with house stuff—until I noticed I was losing weight. I'd all but given up on self-care. House-productivity was just escapism—a constructive form of escapism, doing stuff that needed to be done anyway, but it was a way of procrastinating on everything else because I didn't want to face up to it.

The mental health issues are even worse for the kids. They've had a rough go of it the last few years: Dad left, Mum was an emotionally volatile mess for two years straight, and they got uprooted from everything they knew and plopped down in a new country to start over. Now, just when things are supposed to be getting better, we have this interminable pandemic.

Supporting them is what's taking its toll on me. Sometimes it's fine, because I can see the breakdowns coming and I can head it off. Sometimes, I don't see them coming, and I realise too late that I picked the wrong time to get insistent about doing a chore. Then all my plans are wiped out for a few hours as I try to defuse everything. Usually badly, as my brain isn't good at switching tracks from whatever project I was on to focus on human interaction.

A few weeks back, I posted to Facebook about how I wanted to be something other than Mum for a little while. Some friends offered to video chat with the kids so I could have a break, but that wasn't what I meant. It's not difficult to get time away from the kids; what I miss is being Sarah. 

Our family doesn't have our support bubble this time around, and we sorely miss that... I miss being a girlfriend as well as a Mum, I miss having somebody who wants to go out for a walk, we all miss having a fresh face to talk to and a different meal to eat. Something that isn't the same as every other day!

Socialising in general is something we're badly in need of. They chat with their Dad most days, but that's not getting them out of the parent-child dynamic. My daughter's got a few online friends on various games (she's allowed to be on game-chats on the understanding that I may glance at her screen at any time to check everything's OK), but my son isn't into net-chat, and I'm not active in any online community lately... probably the first time in my adult life that that's been the case. We don't do many video calls either. 

We should do. There's no excuse. I have family and friends who'd be willing, and there's no end of virtual events to try, if we want something other than a basic chat. It would do all of us the world of good to talk regularly to other people. But it only happens every now and then, even with me thinking about how good it would be for us.

(One friend, a mother herself, understood my afore-mentioned Facebook post exactly, and the two of us have occasional video-chats, mostly framed around watching an episode or two of Bridgerton and then discussing it, letting me live another side of myself for a while. But, because we're both parents and Life is a Thing, these happen infrequently and often get postponed. They don't benefit the children either.)

My vague theory is that as the lone adult of the household, I get tired of being the one to set everything up, to always be the one encouraging others to participate in my choice of activity—often with very poor returns of enthusiasm.

At any rate, I'm doing a bad job of keeping up my end of the social network, and the whole household is suffering as a result.

As gloomy as this is, our life-rollercoaster isn't a white knuckle ride. We're not getting the high highs, but nor are the lows too low. Thankfully, this is just a part of our lives it will pass. In another few weeks, the kids at least will be back in school (I haven't figured out yet whether it makes the most sense to return to my course before or after Easter). The weather will have improved. We can meet up with my parents again. By the end of the year, we should be able to hug, to travel, to make more friends...

Of course, it's easy for me, with 43 years of living through difficult periods, to have confidence in this being temporary. It's less easy for children, and in the case of my two, I've been saying: "We've just got to get through this difficult bit and then things will get better!" since we came to England in summer 2019.

Small wonder they're getting a bit suspicious of the whole Hope concept. All I can do is keep trying to find the patience for all three of us.

My house

Making this house ours has been a leisurely process so far as we find ourselves more focused on schoolwork, but it's already our home. As with all new homes, we're discovering an escalating list of problems now we've moved in, but I'm still so thrilled we found this place. It's perfect for us.

I knew we needed a guestroom, even if it was a dining room that we used as a guestroom. I like having people to stay. I'm an introvert, but I enjoy being around other people, and as a single mother, I really appreciate having adult company in the house. 

The house has an extra room downstairs that the sellers were using as a study. I decided I wanted a library more than a study, so I flogged my desk on Facebook Marketplace and put the bookshelves up instead. It's going to require some creative organisation to make it a comfortable bedroom as well, but a sofa bed is on its way. I've always wanted a library and if the idea of bedding down in a roomful of books doesn't appeal to you, you are no friend of mine.

The other thing we needed was room for our sofa. Our sectional is a good size by American standards, and bloody massive by British ones. Our mover was dumbfounded. I knew from the room measurements there was the physical space for it, but I wasn't sure how it would fit around the door, radiator, kitchen...

Thankfully, it looks like it was made for this room, dividing the space beautifully, though I may want to replace the round kitchen table with a rectangular one in due course. I credit the sofa for the cats settling in so quickly. The fact that this was their third move in eighteen months almost certainly helped, but the sofa means home in a way nothing else does, and the cats were purring and confident as soon as they found it.

For the first time, the children have a home with a fireplace! Two in fact, since the one in my bedroom has been left in place, although it's purely ornamental now. The massive fireplace downstairs has been redone and fitted with a woodburning stove, which we're all getting the hang of using. In this grey, mizzly weather and the repetitive grind of lockdown, it's very nice to curl up on the sofa (cats included) for cosy evenings in front of the fire.

Upstairs, I have a couple of candles in my grate, and my grandmother's silver pheasants on the 'hearth'. When I was a little girl, those pheasants were permanently falling over on her hearth, and now they can fall over on mine. 

I have her old secretary next to it as well. As I said, I didn't want a study. Nan's old-fashioned little fold-out desk is fine for paperwork. I should perhaps buy a new filing cabinet, but for now, I've put everything into a concertina folder. In this era of 'going paperless', we have fewer documents to store after all.
 

My daughter wanted a conservatory. Luckily for her, the owners of twenty years ago followed the home-improvement fad of adding one. However, they were more ambitious than most homeowners who squeezed in a small glassy nook along the patio. The conservatory matches the length of the kitchen and living room, with a deep bay area and two different exits to the outside.

I have plans for this to be the 'teenage hangout room' when the kids brings friends over in the future, possibly doubling up as extra sleeping space in the summer months. Ideally, I'd like to put a proper roof on it to make it more usable in cold or hot weather, but owing to its size, I'm not sure I can afford that.

For now, the conservatory is acting as a box room, stacked up with the things that we haven't figured out what to do with yet. However, I've kept enough space clear for a sort of nest with the old papasan chair and two recently-gifted giant beanbags. When the sun comes out, it warms up quickly into a luxurious respite for us: cuddling down into the beanbags even as we bask in vitamin D and listen to birds sing...  The cats are loving it.

The cats are also loving the garden. The flat had a rectangle of grass with no undergrowth for them. Here, we have shrubs galore. Two owners back was a lady who was passionate about exotic gardens, and her legacy is a small fortune in landscaping and lots of different plants.

As far as the mogs are concerned, they like eating the ornamental grasses (and then being sick), and the retaining wall that runs up the side of the garden makes a perfect secret tunnel for them behind the plants.

I like that they can't get out. Cars don't have to slow down for our hamlet, and they whizz by at 60mph. In our cats' younger days, we could never have lived here. Now that they're old and arthritic, they've no interest in trying to climb the fencing. Though Trog does keep eyeing up the pergola....

There's a child's swing on the pergola, which I wasn't expecting the previous owners to leave. My two love it, even if it's a lot tamer than the swing we had in the States. We still have that swing, but there's nothing in the garden with the proper height for it. That's one wish we didn't get, but we're more than willing to make this concession. 

If I were a fictional character, seeking refuge in Cornwall after a heartbreak, there would be a country lane running from our house to the sea. In reality, nothing that close to the coastline is in our budget, but we're only a few miles from the coast, tucked away from the worst of the summer traffic. Our house is semi-detached rather than a self-contained cottage, but the building is a century old—thankfully much modernised in the last four years—and when we moved in we found a box-file containing the information on all the previous owners.

For most of my house's existence, it's been owned by women: a widow and a spinster who held it for almost fifty years until both had died; another who retired here at the beginning of the century and only sold the house when she had to move into a care home. I like knowing that. Knowing that it's been a home to women, to older women who've loved and lost. Their feet wore the grooves in the hallway's stone steps, and now mine will deepen them.