‘I feel exhausted and drained and we haven’t even got to the summer holidays yet – I’m not sure if I can take any more. I’ve always loved being a mum, but this has really made me question how I feel about motherhood.’
This summer I saw this post come up on a parenting group I follow on Facebook. It was from a mother of two children, aged three and seven. She normally works full time, relying on a combination of nursery, school and grandparents for childcare. This means that from March to September, she was trying to hold down a 40-hour-a-week job and look after two small children (her husband is a keyworker, and so hasn’t been at home to help with this precarious balancing act). In July, 'Super Saturday' saw the two-metre rule get relaxed to one-metre, opening pubs and letting people get a haircut filled the papers. But, as she vented in her frustration on social media, her lockdown was far from over.
‘Both sets of grandparents are fairly vulnerable, and my in laws, who have always done the most childcare, have been shielding up until this point,’ she wrote. ‘So even if they change the rules [although you can now form a social bubble with another household, social distancing rules must still be enforced], getting them to look after two small children would seem irresponsible at best. I’m just going to have to keep going until September and cross my fingers that the schools open and I can find a childminder to take the toddler. I can’t bear to think about what will happen otherwise. I feel guilty about saying this because we’re all healthy and safe, but this has been the worst year of my life.’
At the time her post had thousands of shares and comments (almost) all supportive, with other mothers sharing their own feelings of guilt, frustration and exhaustion, because if you’ve got children at home and a full-time job, there’s every chance you’re in It for the long haul.
And we really do mean the long haul - for all the hope that by September the kids would be back at school and we'd be in some sort of normality, this last term has seen chaos for many parents. Statistics from the Department of Education showed that in just one week in October, 400,000 pupils were off school for Coronavirus related reasons. Entire year groups have been sent home from school at a time when faced in a Coronavirus outbreak, and now teachers are in a battle with Government over whether to suddenly send children home early for Christmas in the midst of soaring virus rates and fears that children will be forced to isolate away from relatives on Christmas day.
Ros, 40, suddenly finds herself right back in this situation again with both of her children suddenly off school. 'With the kids in school and good news about the vaccine, I was starting to feel optimistic again. Then school and nursery closed overnight and it's like going back in time to lockdown one, trying to juggle wfh and home schooling - but this time it's freezing outside and dark at 4pm. The kids are going stir crazy and I feel like I'm failing at every aspect of my job and parenting.'
So when will working parents get a break?
Speaking in the summer, Angela, 39, who has two daughters aged four and one, was finding it harder than ever. ‘At first it felt like everyone was in the same boat, but one by one my colleagues’ lives have got easier – their child’s school year has reopened for example, or they’ve got the nanny back in, they’ve managed to find a childminder or, in a couple of cases they’ve got their mum to come in and help, which I do understand, but it just isn’t an option for us.
‘My eldest should have been allowed back to school, but they decided they couldn’t open safely, and then my youngest’s nursery said they’d only be able to do a couple of half days a week to “give everyone the chance of some childcare,” which seemed a bit pointless
‘It feels like there’s no end in sight, and while other people seem to have got their working life back in order, I’m still in disarray. Everyone was really sympathetic at first, but I definitely feel like that’s waning now, and the expectation is that I should have magicked some childcare up out of thin air, so to try and make up for it, I’m just working longer and longer hours, and getting more and more exhausted.'
Almost six months later, I ask Amelia how she's faring now? 'If you'd told me in the summer that we'd still be in this situation, I'd have cried,' she tells me. 'Both my children have been pulled out of school or nursery at short notice several times this term, and now I'm waiting to see if my eldest will be sent home from school early, while I frantically scrabble around trying to get my work finished for the year. Of course this means I'll end up finishing it up over Christmas - the one opportunity I've had for a bit of a rest since March.'
There's another element to this, of course. We can see that secondary-school aged children in particular seem to be driving up rates in certain parts of the country, and with Christmas round the corner, we're all loathed to put elderly or vulnerable relatives - or indeed anyone we care about - in any more danger. But this creates a whole other series of emotional, professional and physical trade offs. We've all made them this year, but for working parents, they're endless.
For the parents who are still working punishing hours trying to fit work around full-time childcare – and there are plenty of them – there’s still no end in sight. And while everyone looks forward to 2021 and a brighter year now we have a vaccine, for working parents, the pressure is piled on. So yes, it’s great that we might be back to 'normal' for the summer - but between now and then, we need a better solution to this pressing problem.