My kids are having a brief moment to watch a “Phineas and Ferb” episode while chicken nuggets are in the oven, so I’m going to make this brief.
This is really hard. I woke up this morning at the time I used to get up to make my 7th grader breakfast. I cherished those quiet, dark mornings of just the two of us before the rest of my six kids got up and dressed for 5th, 4th, 2nd, Kindergarten and Preschool. We are a large family that runs on routine, schedule and predictability. I work from home and have loved that balance of spending precious moments with my children when they’re home and having precious few hours to get some work done while they’re gone.
All that is gone now.
We are all family, all the time. And there’s a uniqueness to being a large family in this moment.
I remember when I found out we were pregnant with our sixth child and I felt this twinge of embarrassment that we were one of THOSE families with all the kids. Somehow I feel like that embarrassment is coming back. Although we’ve handled the challenges of six kids really well in our “normal” life, somehow I should have known there would come a time where we would be required for MONTHS to just stay in our home, implement whatever requirements the school had, and keep them away from the people who normally support us– grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, church friends and the babysitter. THE BABYSITTER, PEOPLE. This is desperate.
Obviously it’s not rational that I should have expected this day would someday come. I shouldn’t feel embarrassed for how hard it is to make this work. It’s just tough. All the routines we’ve established, the ways we practice self-care, the time we typically invest in our marriage. . . it just can’t happen the way it has before. So before that “Phineas and Ferb” episode is over, I want to say a few things to anybody else in this boat:
-If you only have energy for your family, that’s okay. Many times during the day I think about friends I love and I want to check in on them. I can’t. I’m using so many words a day to just manage life here, I have nothing left. I’m bone tired, weary, exhausted. It seems like such a sweet idea to do some kind of virtual catch-up with friends, but I don’t have it in me. Especially because there isn’t an option where we just sit silently together in our shared exhaustion. Texting, phone calls, Face Time, it all requires words and words are what I’m tragically short on once I’ve given them all to my kids. I’m working on letting go of the weight of my own expectations of myself when it comes to being a good friend. I hate it, but that’s where I’m at right now. Feeling bad about that won’t actually make it better.
-Figure out how to be alone. In case you’re wondering, it’s possible to spend EVERY WAKING MOMENT (and some of your sleeping ones) with your children and still have them complain when you leave the house to take a walk. Do it anyway. I’m taking walks with the dog, taking long baths, locking my bedroom door for a few moments, or cleaning a bathroom (turns out nobody interrupts me in case I might ask them to help). If you have to turn on a movie in order to get some alone time, do it without guilt. The things we say when we’re all out of patience can be much more damaging than one more viewing of Frozen 2.
-Big kids can help little kids. My 7th grader is probably learning more from helping the Kindergartener with her reading work than he’s learning from the review stuff he’s been assigned so far. This is not lazy parenting, this is delegation. This is survival. He’s better for it, she loves that time with him, and I can focus on the kid who’s struggling at that moment.
-It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay for the kids to be sad AND it’s okay for me to be sad. I’m not going to linger there, but it’s disingenuous to not acknowledge it. No matter how much you love your kids (and I love mine an awful lot), having all your plans ripped away and replaced with uncertainty and global panic is not awesome. Grieving that change doesn’t mean you’re grieving having to be with your children. You can love your children and still miss the old life where they had other people to educate and care for them and you had other opportunities for interactions.
-Find a schedule that works for YOU. There are all these schedules floating around out there and I’ve noticed that they are typically “one size fits all” type schedules. The whole family is doing school time for an hour, then creative time for an hour, then reading for an hour, etc. I just don’t think that’s realistic when you’re doing education for six kids. Two of them can do their school time while two of them do independent reading and two of them play a game together. I can’t facilitate the education of six grade levels at once, especially when we’re dealing with curriculum I didn’t choose, I’m not familiar with, and I’m playing catch-up. This is NOT typical homeschooling. Finding the schedule that works for your kids is going to be about trial and error and that’s okay. Nothing has to be set in stone. Change what doesn’t work, but give it time to figure out if it really doesn’t work or if it’s just something you need to get used to.
-You may need to literally schedule the ENTIRE day. I know there are parents making it work by telling their kids to do their school work and then they can do what they want the rest of the day. That is a recipe for absolute chaos in my large family. Kids will skim through work in order to get done as fast as possible and then the rest of the day I’ll be fielding screen time requests and refereeing arguments over toys. No thank you. So we are scheduled from 9-4:30 (and honestly, pretty scheduled the rest of the day until bedtime, but they don’t necessarily know that since I don’t post that schedule). If they finish something early, they may have free time until the next hour and then they’re back on the schedule.
-Don’t assume everybody is having fun but you. There are a lot of cute pictures out there of kids doing sidewalk chalk and puppet shows and making banana bread. People don’t tend to post pictures of the time everybody was crying or somebody got creative with powdered sugar on the living room rug or how surly the teenager has been every minute of every day. Work hard to avoid comparison during this time when for a lot of us our only experience of the outside world is via social media. Especially avoid the comparison game when you’re comparing someone else’s family life with two kids to your life with five or six or ten. They are going to be different and that’s okay.
Lean into the good things. Our evenings are free for the first time in. . . forever. I’m loving this. When things go back to normal, I don’t want to have missed out on embracing this special time.
Well, I smell the chicken nuggets are burning, so I’ll wrap up here. Let me know how you’re making this work or what you’re struggling through! We need each other, even if we don’t have the words or energy to connect.
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