Lockdown Part II: The Great Divide
Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how lockdown feels when you don’t have kids
France has entered its second season of lockdown — as some call it jokingly — since October 30, and me and my partner have been working from home ever since the first lockdown in March 2020.
By the end of that first governmental tentative to decrease the COVID-19 spread (with much more drastic measures back then) and which ended back in May, I got a call from my friend Sandra* who just got out of her last Zoom call of the day at 7 PM.
She.
Was.
Drowning.
While she seemed hesitant at first to share how hard the confinement had hit her and her everyday life in so many ways, I myself was quite comfortable telling anyone and everyone about the woes of going, in the span of a day, from “normal” life to full remote work, school closures and written dispensations to get out of your house for one hour tops. For that, I can thank Jessica Valenti’s or Kelli María Korducki’s on point Medium articles carefully curated into my daily digest that got me familiar with the very concept of losing it between four walls and 2, 3 or more family members.
She, on the other hand, began to explain how little was shared from her co-workers about how depressing and exhausting the situation was, and how none of the sudden home-schooling-24/7 parenting-5 days a week working was taken into account when having non-stop online meetings and a never-ending task list longer than the number of current daily Covid cases in France. Then I asked her: “Do your colleagues have kids?” She replied “Actually…no. No they don’t”
The elephant in the room
“Ahhh, but that’s what makes a WHOLE difference”, I then told her. I put her at ease by reassuring her that it was perfectly normal to be at wit’s end when you have to keep on doing “business as usual” work-wise, but all of a sudden cook homemade meals 3 times a day, keep a toddler entertained -which are known to have 5-minute attention spans and the energy of 10 Navy SEALs combined, trying to figure out the teacher’s preschool exercises of the day while obviously keeping a nice enough figure (let’s not put the standards too high here) for your partner, which translates into at best not looking like a cracked up wretched hag ready to jump off the window next time someone asks what’s it gonna be for dinner/breakfast/lunch. Which is always less than 4 hours away, anyway. Every day. Wash, rinse, repeat this for MONTHS on end and you have the perfect recipe for a nervous breakdown.
She was incredibly relieved knowing that her struggles were shared by another FMOSK like me (Fellow Mother Of a Small Kid — yes, I made up an acronym in my head to virtually connect to any struggling young parent out there). She really thought she was “weak” and wasn’t managing as well as the others because she was too exhausted “for no apparent reason” (in her own words!) and wouldn’t share why to her manager out of shame of not keeping it up, which seemingly everyone else succeeded in, and which made her situation even worse: adding guilt to burn-out. However, I left it at that when she had to get off the phone to check what’s left in the fridge for dinner while I could hear her toddler throwing a tantrum for getting a chocolate chip cookie that contained too few chips (damn you, store brands!)
And that’s when I realized the separate worlds we were living in during this pandemic:
- people with small kids,
- people with grown-up or at least largely autonomous kids,
- and people with no kids at all.
I cannot vouch for people with older children because I don’t know many and even though I hear counts of parents feeling concerned because of teenage boredom and missing out on a very crucial period of socialization in their life, damn do I bear witness to the great divide that lockdown can be for people with small kids and people without!
I see the latter sharing posts about transcending boredom (read: F.R.E.E T.I.M.E) and motivating oneself to finally turn off Netflix and try on some new project, or pick up one that was left off times ago. Oh, the endless opportunities to learn a new language, start a new side-hustle! And my personal favorite: allllll those painfully excruciating posts of self-development. Do yoga! Try a new diet! Pick up watercolor painting! Take the time to meditate and reflect on your personal growth and start a freakin’ journal to explore within yourself! Me? Oh I’m just stuck here “exploring” my apartment’s mess trying to figure out where my daughter hid my brand new Too Faced eye shadow palette.
At moments, I feel a tinge of motivation while my mind begins to wander around endless possibilities when I read something about tending to your garden or finally completing that DIY project. But then it becomes envy. Then it leads to questioning.
Do these people even work?!
Sure, the schools are open again -for now, and my kid is in class 4 days a week from 8:30am to 4:30pm. But my days remain full of meetings and work in-between, or vice-versa.
On top of that, I’m a person who used to be always working on an exciting new side-project, who loves — who needs to play video games. Gimme those two and I’d fill up my days and weekends in no time. I’m a night owl with a huuuuge habit of napping, but have I been able to indulge in any of these since March, especially since March? You bet I haven’t!
When timing isn’t your forte
So yes, I’m growing tired. Yes, I’m becoming bitter towards the twenty-something childless population, or actually anybody who doesn’t exactly happen to have kids between 1 and 6 in 2020 at that point. I sometimes imagine life if the pandemic hit back when I was childless, a little shy of 4 years ago, and how I could be spending my days, or nights, or at least weekends, on all those things that kept me going and fulfilled outside of my 9-to-5 job. How I got excited when it was Friday and with it, the promise of a wonderful occasion to sleep in until noon…TWO days in a row! So, yes, I think childless people during this pandemic have it eaaaaasy, compared to the rest of us. As a homebody, I sure as hell would be having the time of my life.
When I decided to get pregnant, I knew (sort of) what I was getting myself into. I was ready for the lifelong commitment and the challenges of trying to balance work life, private life and parenting. Because that’s what everybody does and everybody did for decades and I do find solace in knowing that other people have been through, or are going through, the same thing as me. But I sure as hell didn’t sign up for this. In the end, it’s the total lack of control on the situation that gets to me. And the fear of letting my daughter go to any extracurricular activity because of the obvious increased risk of catching the virus compared to being at home as much as possible. I’m not even trying to figure out which activities are open or available anyway, because these times are so uncertain that they keep on opening, closing, limiting attendance and so on. It’s really nerve-wracking in and out of itself and I cannot afford to address this right now. I’m just trying to live through this by seeing the glass half full and realizing that I get to see my daughter as much as I can and that I could never have achieved that, had I still to commute 1 hour+ to work. But also the fact that she’s hopefully, probably, too small to remember vividly any of this, IF the pandemic was to go away any time soon.
The first lockdown was violent. No schools, no shops except for groceries, no restaurants, no leaving your house for more than 1 hour and no farther than 1 km. But it worked. The tension on hospital beds and reanimation capacity dropped, and so did the spread and death count. The current one is much more lenient and we’re obviously not seeing the results yet, if any. However, I’m not letting my own issues and personal interest cloud my judgment: if the current efforts are not enough to flatten the exponential curve, then so be it, I’m ready for a second total lockdown, and by then I will pour my heart into teaching my daughter to play on her own… at least for the length of a Netflix episode :)
*Name has been changed for privacy
