Tag: COVID-19

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Rest in the time of lockdown

Lockdown + holiday

I am writing this in the middle of the 2021 Sydney lockdown, which started at the beginning of the school holidays. This was bad timing for us as it meant we had to cancel our holiday to Port Macquarie. We were even on our way there when the Premier announced a press conference: we got as far as Gosford when we decided to turn around and come home again, because lockdown restrictions would have followed us there and we agreed it was better to suffer through lockdown in our house instead of our two bedroom flat AirBnb. So that was a long way to go just to eat McDonald’s in the carpark! When we returned home, my youngest complained, “This is the most boringest day of my life.” She did have a point.

For the next week, we stayed home, sleeping in, reading books and binge-watching things. My mother and her partner very kindly gave me my birthday present early, which was a subscription to Disney+, so we caught up on Pixar films, and Ben and I started watching The Mandalorian. I tried to deal my disappointment and subsequent depression but it was very hard: I haven’t had a leave-the-house-and-go-somewhere holiday in such a long time (which I know is such a first world problem)—in almost a year, really, though I’m not sure if I can really count the trip we took to Terrigal with a friend and her daughter during the September break last year as we were solo/tag-team parenting the entire time. I felt like I was on the verge of burnout. I also felt like I was being overly dramatic even saying that.

Still, I made lemonade with the lemons life gave me. After chatting with another friend about what she does with her kids, I made a checklist for the girls that contained a bunch of things they had to do before they were allowed on screens. It includes:

  • Guitar practice;
  • Chores;
  • Exercise/outdoor play for at least 20 minutes;
  • Reading a book for at least 20 minutes;
  • Colour/writing/drawing something for at least 20 minutes;
  • Making/building something creative; and
  • Tidying up.

The girls took to it pretty enthusiastically and didn’t even complain. If they completed everything (which sometimes happened by 11:30am), we let them spend the rest of the day on screens. That helped give us all a bit of a break—even though for me, I was only really taking a break from work work; the normal routine of housework continued uninterrupted.

Lockdown + work

In the second week, the challenge was adding work to the load. The girls continued with their checklists and screen time quite happily, while I fit my hours around everything else that was happening.

Then the Premier extended the lockdown and announced that all school children would be starting home learning. And I fell into a bit of a depression about cancelling all the birthday plans I had so carefully laid—the two-night sleepover the girls were going to do with my in-laws; the night out on the town that Ben was going to take me on; the trip to the cinema with my Marvel movie buddy to see Black Widow—and I feel so hard, I had trouble recovering. The prospect of returning to home learning didn’t help; I still had fresh memories of how that went the last time around. The weekend before, I spent an entire afternoon googling “pandemic parental burnout”, and that revealed two things:

  1. I wasn’t really burned out. (Not yet, anyway.) But I was probably on my way there.
  2. The number one piece of advice people gave to parents in lockdown and to people suffering from burnout was to look after yourself, look after yourself, look after yourself. That means carving out time for yourself and being intentional about doing self-care things.

“Well that makes sense,” I thought. But part of me also wanted to have a tantrum and scream and cry, “BUT WHEN WILL SOMEONE ELSE LOOK AFTER ME?” Being a parent means constant caretaking—giving, giving and giving some more. Furthermore, it’s not a reciprocal relationship: what you put in doesn’t necessarily come back. I love my kids, but I get tired of caretaking, and the thing with lockdowns is that the normal parental supports—school, after school care, grandparents, and so on—just aren’t there. You’re pretty much on your own.

(Except for screens. Thank God for screens. I mean it.)

Even though I bang on about mental health and have written and self-published an entire anthology about depression, I still find it hard sometimes to admit I have a problem. But I did share that with various people who prayed for me and who were very understanding—the sort of people who weren’t going to tell me to suck it up, that other people have it worse than me, and that I have nothing to whinge about it. They were sad for me and expressed their sympathy in helpful ways.

And in the end, my birthday was as nice as a birthday could be in lockdown: the girls and I livestreamed church; I caught up with various church people via Zoom afterwards (who wished me a happy birthday!); we ordered in sushi for lunch; we had a karaoke party in the afternoon in our karaoke basement (which my family weren’t too keen about, so I partied on my own for a bit and even tried doing a Facebook Live video that got pulled down for copyright infringement); we ate and enjoyed the Basque cheesecake I had made the day before; we ordered in pizza for dinner; and then in the evening, my Marvel movie buddy and I had a Teleparty and watched the live action Mulan on Disney+. And that helped me feel better about things heading into the new week.

Lockdown + work + home learning

This week, home learning began. But we had a day’s reprieve as the teachers returned to work and figured out what to do for lessons. I spent Monday getting ready: I made a new “before screen time” checklist for the girls that added the home learning and drop the making/building element (though I did tell them that if home learning tasks overlapped with checklist tasks, they could totally check them off). I got an extension cord and a six-plug powerboard, and set them up at the other end of the dining table to where we eat in the back room of the house where we get the most sun. I moved our laptops there and set them up with headphones. The laptop my youngest used last year for home learning finally died (it was about 11-12 years old—good innings for a MacBook), so I made a separate login for Saski on my home laptop as I figured I’d be on my work laptop during home learning anyway. And then the new term began.

Laptops for home learning.

So this is how our days currently go:

  • I sleep in until 8am (which is truly the best thing about lockdown) and then read my Bible and pray before getting up and having breakfast. (I recently started using PrayerMate for the prayer part and it has been incredibly helpful.)
  • I look after the morning routine Monday to Friday and Sunday, which means getting the girls up (usually by 8:45am) and dressed, doing their hair, getting breakfast into them, reading the Bible with them and brushing their teeth.
  • We get stuck into home learning around 9:30am. Miss 10 is pretty self-directed and most of the time, all I need to do is make sure she stays on task instead of watching random things on YouTube or messaging her friends. Occasionally she needs a little help with maths, but that’s about it. I spend most of my time with Miss 7, who needs a lot more help—particularly with the tech side. I load up her Google Classroom and watch some of the videos on double speed on my work laptop just to stay ahead. Sometimes I’m able to do work around them (half an hour to an hour, though my measurements are imprecise), but it has to be more administrative things, like formatting Word documents or converting Word documents to HTML or updating websites—anything that can be interrupted, really, because I am interrupted every three to five minutes. Anything that requires more sustained focus—any sort of editing or writing—has to wait until the afternoon.
  • The girls are usually finished with home learning by lunchtime/1pm. I make them pack sandwiches for the entire week on Monday so that they’re ready for when they get hungry, and then I add some fresh veggies to round things out. For myself, sometimes I make myself something as I prefer a hot lunch in winter (e.g. I’ll do a large chicken soup, freeze half of it and then eat through the rest over the next three or four days). Or I’ll have leftovers or something.
  • Then after lunch, the girls will tackle the last items on their checklists and go on screens while I tackle my job, which I’ve spaced across the week so that it’s roughly 2-3 hours a day. (I also have some time in lieu up my sleeve that I use, plus my boss is super understanding. I don’t know how people who work full-time do it. One podcast I listen to suggested that one parent do the 6am-12pm shift with the kids while the other works, and then they swap for the 12-6pm shift, and I thought that sounded horrible.) In addition, I am trying to keep up the exercise on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays now that we have the space for it: my gym has been making their Zoom classes available to all members, and they’re downloadable, which means I can do them whenever I want. I’ve found it’s worked best when I do them in the late afternoon, and then I can have a shower and tackle dinner, or vice versa. I shudder to think how much muscle strength I’ve lost these three weeks as going back to the gym and handling weights again is going to be painful. But it’s better than nothing.
  • Then comes dinner at 6pm. I stick to my current pattern of making a three-night meal on Monday, a two-night meal on Thursday, a one-night meal on Saturday, and then we order takeaway on Sunday.
  • After dinner, Ben handles the bed and bathtime routine while I finish off any housework I might have been doing throughout the day (e.g. laundry); I make calls to people in my Bible Study group to check on them and pray with them; I catch up with a friend over the phone; I tackle the never-ending admin; and I do other things that are on my checklist—e.g. at least one lesson of Duo Lingo (Japanese), reading at least one chapter of a book, writing at least 100 words on my novel, and staying on top of Twitter.
  • And then after the girls are in bed, I watch TV—sometimes with Ben and sometimes not. (I am currently binging the fourth season of Angel on Disney+.)

Lockdown rest?

All the while I am conscious of what people and those YouTube videos on burnout have been saying to me: look after yourself, look after yourself, look after yourself. So I have been trying. I have been exercising, reading books, watching TV and keeping up with people.

Still, now that a lot of the rest-type things I normally do have been taken away, it begs the question, how exactly do people rest?

Good thing I read this book (very slowly!) a couple of years ago: Rest: Why you get more done when you work less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. I agree with his argument in theory (his argument’s in the book’s subtitle), but I also found the book infuriating because he focused primarily on the lives of male politicians, scientists and artists who were able to achieve and create great things in four hours a day while also resting a lot while ignoring the fact that other people were freeing them up to do that. Who was looking after their children, doing their laundry, cooking their meals and cleaning their houses? It certainly wasn’t them. The fact that Pang does not acknowledge the amount privilege involved in living lives filled with rest was so infuriating, I put the book down for a long while.

But I did find a helpful bit towards the end where he talks about things that actually help promote rest:

Sonnentag and her colleagues argue that there are four major factors that contribute to recovery: relaxation, control, mastery experiences, and mental detachment from work. Think of them as a bit like vitamins. Breaks that are high in all four are the equivalent of nutritious and nourishing meals; those that don’t are like empty calories. (p. 166)

Here’s a nice little summary of all four:

Detachment refers to mental disengagement from work-related thoughts. Relaxation implies low levels of mental or physical activation and little physical or intellectual effort. Control refers to being able to decide on one’s leisure schedule and activities. Mastery encompasses learning opportunities and challenges, resulting in feelings of achievement and competence. Of these four experiences, detachment seems to be most consistently associated with positive changes in well-being.

So I’ve been trying to work out how to implement all four into my life:

  • Mental detachment is, in some ways, the easiest, because it happens once I get pulled into a novel, a TV show or a movie (and to a certain extent, my novel). The difficulty is being able to do that for a sustained uninterrupted period of time.
  • Relaxation is harder to achieve because it requires being organised enough to get the stuff that needs to be done—housework, paid work, etc—out of the way to clear the time to actually do it.
  • Control: well, I’m a control freak, plus I’m a structured control freak, so imposing my own timetable on our days has been helpful. Where I need to improve is being disciplined in my use of time, otherwise it all falls apart into time confetti.
  • Mastery: I guess this is where things like knitting and exercise fall. I do like learning new things and getting better at them, and even though I hate exercise, I do get some satisfaction from having improved at something.

It continues to be a work in progress.

I have been becoming more mindful after reading about/researching all this, though. For example, I feel less guilty about stopping and reading a chapter of a book before starting the next thing for work. There’s something freeing about intentionally adding a little padding into the day—discretionary time when I am allowed to do something I enjoy instead of something I have to do.

Towards the end of Rest, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues for shorter breaks more often instead of longer breaks less often:

These results further undermine the idea that our mental energies refill with time, rather than through activities that promote recovery. They also suggest that we should reassess the role of breaks, and the rhythm of vacations, in our lives. Regularly and decisively breaking from our jobs, disconnecting from the office in the evenings and on weekends, and choosing to do things that are relaxing, mentally absorbing and physically challenging—in other words, engaging in a form of active rest—will promote recovery of our mental resources and make us more effective, productive, and focused. Rather than treating vacations as big, annual events that are completely separate from our working lives, taking shorter but more frequent vacations every few months provides greater levels of recovery. As Jessica De Bloom, a psychologist at the University of Tampere and vacation researcher, puts it, vacations are like sleep: you need to take them regularly to benefit. (p. 172)

I take his point. I’ve got holiday booked for mid-November—a housework-free, child-free one, even. God-willing, lockdown will be over, more people will have been vaccinated and borders will be by then, and I’ll actually be able to go. Until then, I’ll keep attempting this rest thing as best I can.

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Trying to write during a pandemic

Attempting to create art at any time is an audacious and difficult act. Attempting to do it during a pandemic can be near impossible.

When I realised that COVID-19 was serious enough to warrant keeping our children home from school, part of me was also deeply in denial. I knew that home learning in combination with my part-time job would completely decimate my writing time. It had taken a while, but I had finally reached the stage where I had managed to confine my paid working hours to Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, thereby leaving Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturday mornings free to focus on the writing. (I would average about 8-14 hours per week.) I had grown accustomed to spending many a happy hour sitting in one of my local cafés, the library or even the food court near my gym, plugging away at my current work in progress—a young adult fantasy novel set in a world that roughly resembled Edo-era Japan. I viewed writing as being my part-time unpaid job, and even though no one in particular was awaiting this manuscript and even though it may not end up being very publishable (because the one book has since turned into two and publishers are less likely to pick up series these days), I liked what I was doing and wanted to see it to completion.

I spent that last day before home learning began out on our balcony, ignoring my paid job and defiantly scribbling because I knew I would not get the opportunity to do that for a long while.

Then when shutdown measures were put in place and our girls were home with us all the time, life changed completely. It took a while to get used to the new normal, but eventually it started looking like this:

  • Waking up later than usual and having my breakfast (one nice thing about the pandemic is being able to sleep in a little; I am thankful I have kids who will do this);
  • Getting the girls up, dressed and breakfasted; supervising home learning for both Miss 9 and Miss 6 using the schedule the teachers send through at the beginning of the week (it consists of a weekly timetable filled with tasks—mainly English and Maths, but occasionally there are activities related to Science, History, Health, Art, Library and [guh] PE. [I never thought parenting would involve teaching my child the Macarena and the Nutbush]). On a good day, I will spend most of my time supervising Miss 6 while Miss 9 just gets on with it; on a bad day, I will be on both their cases to try and get them to do the work. On a great day, I will even be able to get a few work-related tasks done at the same time. We are fortunate to have enough devices for this: Ben and I never got rid of our old laptops, so the girls have one each for their school work and occasional Zoom meetings;
  • Breaking for lunch: I pack four days’ worth of lunches at the beginning of the week so all the girls need to do is take their lunchbox out of the fridge. But I still need to prepare lunch for me and Ben. Most days it’s a salad of some description. On Fridays, we get takeaway from our local café as a way of supporting them and keeping them in business;
  • Making the girls do a bit of tidying and chores. In the early days, we worked on decluttering and tidying their rooms as the build-up had gotten a bit out of hand. These days, it’s more surface cleaning. Or sometimes I will get them to make a card to post to someone (e.g. if there’s a family birthday coming up) or finish some colouring in they started that they refuse to part with. This is also when I am able to squeeze in some housework;
  • Letting the girls have screen time: at the moment, they are completely addicted to Minecraft Education, so I log Miss 9 back into the laptop she uses for home learning and I log Miss 6 onto the iPad. The nice thing is they can play together in their virtual worlds. Occasionally they even get together with other school friends and play. They also never seem to get tired of it!
  • Working on tasks related to my paid job. Now that I’m finally doing just one job instead of two and I have a very lovely employer who is happy for me to work flexibly and who has always allowed me to work from home, I tend to spread my hours across five or six days a week. I also have some time in lieu I can use if need be;
  • My husband taking the girls out for some exercise at around 4pm. This is when I drop everything and write;
  • Throwing dinner together;
  • Squeezing in another hour or so of work after dinner while my husband does the dishes, bath and bedtime (though sometimes this time is also devoted to housework);
  • Spending my evenings after the girls are in bed either watching Netflix, reading, doing more work for the paid job (if need be), catching up with someone over the phone, online Bible Study, etc.
Hallway PE lesson

Hallway PE lesson.

Given I no longer have large swathes of creative time, I’ve found that there’s certain types of writing that I’m just incapable of doing right now. I can’t write new stuff. I can’t even re-draft what I’ve already written because I don’t have the brain capacity. Instead, my writing has consisted of scribbling longhand in a journal about things to do with my novel. It’s not quite a zero draft (though aspects of it are); I think of it being more like a subzero draft. It’s not the prose that will go into the novel; it’s writing around the novel to do with things about the novel.

Initially I wrote about the section I was up to and the section after, trying to work out what happens in it and why. Lately, though, I’ve started sketching out the arcs for each of my point of view characters—trying to work out where the plot twists and turns, as well as some of the finer details around that. Sometimes the sketching takes me off on research tangents. (I spent a very long time looking into Japanese arrows and how they’re made one afternoon.) Sometimes the scribbling is about minor characters I’m trying to get to know. The rule is that I must write about the novel, but I can write about anything I want related to it.

An old me would not have seen the value of this sort of writing because it doesn’t seem like actual writing (even though I am averaging 5-6 hours a week on it). And then a couple of years ago when I was at ACAF (Australian Comic Arts Festival), I was talking to my friend Louie about it and he compared it to that stage of comics when you’re thumbnailing/sketching roughs. He said something about how when you’re doing that, it can seem like you’re not doing much, because usually you’re just messing around and trying things. But often you end up making very key decisions that carry over into later stages of the work—when you’re pencilling/inking/colouring, etc.

That little comment stayed with me because I realised he’s totally right and that it’s true of prose writing too: as I’ve been playing around and giving myself permission to write whatever (even if it’s a grammatical and spelling nightmare, and it sounds completely incoherent), I have been making key decisions about story and characters that I know will carry across into the finished work. What I’m doing isn’t a waste of time; it’s actually constructive and helfpul. Furthermore, it’s even fun.

And when it’s fun, it’s a very nice escape from the current situation. (Indeed, one of the good things about writing a fantasy novel is being able to slip away into a different pandemic-free world.) And that’s very good for sustaining my mental health—at least until the time when I will finally have my writing days back again.