This year has brought us words we never used before in our generation, “social distancing, lockdown, schools cancelled!”
Schools cancelled, words we could have only dreamed about hearing and did as a child, whereas as an adult they brought feelings of dread and nausea. I’m not going to lie, as I stood in the kitchen making dinner on that fateful day listening to Mr Boris talking about shutting the schools, it took everything I had not to simultaneously burst into tears and throw up what very little I had eaten in the anticipation of hearing this news. What on earth were we going to do? How on earth were we going to cope? At this point in time the only way I was coping with my kids were to bundle them off to school for 6 hours a day and recoup before beginning the battles all over again, in a endless round of meltdowns, frustration, tears and mental and physical fights and now I was going to be alone with them. I mean really alone, Rich was still working so was Lela (at least for now) and for how long Mr Boris wasn’t saying, but it didn’t look promising. Day in, day out, all hours of the day because of something I honestly thought we would never see in our lifetime.
Explaining corona virus to the kids wasn’t easy. Due to Samantha’s anxiety and Riley’s lack of understanding/processing we had chosen to shelter them from much of the news, omitting most of the details and the seriousness of the situation and now we were having to address it as their little lives, that were wrapped around routine were about to change in a very big way, in a very small amount of time.
After I had finished my meltdown in the kitchen, we sat down to dinner and after eating (I never want the children to associate bad news with food) we all explained to the children that the virus was worse than people thought and people were getting very sick and dying from it. Mr Boris wanted to protect people so he was closing the schools and asking people to stay at home. They took it really well, Riley went quiet as he does when he is digesting information and Samantha was upset and confused as she was going to miss her friends, but she really hates school so was unsure how she was meant to feel. We had a cuddle and wrapped things up for bed with the explanation that they still had a few days left in school to process things.
The rest of the week continued on as ‘normal’, the kids went to school, I got in school supplies, panic and dread, all with a smile on my face so as to not upset the children anymore than necessary.
The kids left school on Friday 20th March and it took until Sunday for Samantha to process it all enough to meltdown (Samantha will build with snark, it’s how her anxiety presents, for a few days before breaking into a meltdown) but wow it was a good one. She just wasn’t sure what was going to happen in the future, with school, home, seeing people and unfortunately I couldn’t give her the answers. All I could do, when she calmed down, was give her a kiss and cuddle, tell her I loved her and that we would get through it together.
We gave the kids a gentle weekend but got straight into a routine on Monday morning, the children were allowed a little TV when waking before we started the day, which was a huge treat as they never are on school days, but by 10am we were at the dining room table doing school work. We would have a fruit snack at 11am and lunch at 1pm, then the kids would work until somewhere between lunch and 3pm, depending on how they were on the day and what we were doing before having the rest of the day for free play.
We covered everything from English (which both children hate with a passion, they are both dyslexic), math, history and art. We designed our own theme parks including budgets, we played board games and made our own pen holders from loo rolls. Yes there were days when none of us could be bothered but we all pushed through because it was necessary. This included during the ‘school holidays’ as the kids wouldn’t have understood the break in work and then having to return. Just to add here thankfully (for me and the kids at least Lela was furloughed in the second week of the kids being off so I only had to do this for a week on my own).
For us lockdown was a success. We went from having children who were over anxious, stressed out, empty shells of who they were, to children who could read, who could spell, who are confident, less anxious and happy.
Samantha is writing in school now (when last year the most she would write was a sentence and half), She can spell, She will tell the teacher when something is wrong, she will speak to one of us when she is having a bad day and all through lockdown had a tidy room (her anxiety ws so low so was actually able to tidy her room, this is huge). Riley is talking in school this year (he didn’t last year), he is peeling the wallpaper in the house less at the moment (one of the telling signs he is anxious), he is reading, he is spelling and his aggression has massively reduced (although having returned to school it is now on the rise again).
She is an exceptionally loving, humorous and fun loving girl. He is an amazingly funny lad, who is empathic, kind and loving. This was lost with anxiety and stress for the longest time.
Most importantly I love spending time with my children, I hated sending them back. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want them to return to the former shadows of themselves (so far we have prevented this), but more importantly I didn’t want to share them. I miss them while they are at school but I now enjoy and cherish my time with them rather than dread it. It may seem foreign to some that as a parent you can slip into a trap of not liking to spend time with your children and even not liking your child very much, (always still loving them!) but especially when your children have special needs and need a lot more time and attention it can become too much and you stop seeing these moments of joy. All you see is the next task that needs to be performed or the next fight that needs to be stopped or the next meltdown that needs to be avoided, those moments of joy slip just away.
Lockdown has reminded me to stop and look for those moments and although I still have bad days where I have to be reminded, I see those moments of joy much more than I see the moments of suck.
