Breathe.

Just breathe. That’s what they say, isn’t it? When you’re stressed and overwhelmed, they tell us to breathe and they tell us that because it does, actually, work. Concentrating on your breath - those deep, vibrating breaths that go deep into your tummy - can bring us back to the moment when we feel ourselves spiralling.

But there’s a problem. What if the opportunity to ‘just breathe’ doesn’t arise? What if there isn’t a moment where you can relax because you have no idea what’s around the next corner? What if you have to be on high alert all the time because nothing can be taken for granted? That’s what the last two years have been like and so, if you’re feeling exhausted, that’s why.

As humans we take comfort in the fact that routines exist, systems are in place and plans are made because it allows us to lean into that certainty - or perhaps even, lean on that certainty. It’s a comfort knowing that certain things will happen because they always have.

For example, BC (before Covid) we’ve been able to rely on the fact that we can leave the house whenever we want to, that our kids will go to school and, more than that, that schools will be open. We’ve been able to rely on childcare from nurseries, childminders, au pairs, nannies, grandparents, aunties, friends and anyone else we call our ‘village’ without worrying whether they are vulnerable or whether they are negative or positive. We’ve been able to bask in the ease of passive decisions that we don’t have to think about because, until recently, they were pretty much a given.

In the last two years, those things have been taken away from us. Passive decisions no longer exist. Everything is an active decision and that takes up and enormous amount of time and energy. It’s a huge addition to the mental load that we, as women, were already straining under. Every sniffle, sneeze, fever, cough…we’re mentally calculating a Plan B and a Plan C and D and E and F and G. When a Covid spanner is thrown in the works, the domino effect is almost insurmountable. Mentally and emotionally, it’s overwhelming and we have existed on this level of high alert consistently since March 2020.

And it’s not getting any easier. If anything, for women especially, it’s getting harder. The novelty of the pandemic has worn off and the enthusiasm for accommodating the changes that, in a lot of ways, made our life easier (working from home, for example) is starting to wane.

We’re caught in this web of no-mans-land where Covid is still running riot but we’re all supposed to carry on as normal and behind the scenes families are wondering how they’re supposed to test and quarantine and work and isolate and take kids to school and keep calm and carry on.

I don’t know about you - maybe I’m way off base - but it feels chaotic and dangerously unpredictable. Having just come out of 10 days of isolation with my daughter, this whole thing feels very far from over, or from even settling into a new normal.

Unless this is the new normal, in which case, there needs to be some serious catch up in the systems upon which we operate because we can’t keep going at this level with no adjustments.

Anyway, it’s Tuesday. You know it’s my least favourite day of the week - that’s why I put the kids in after-school club on a Tuesday so that they are there till 6pm. That’s what you call making your own silver-fucking-lining. But I wanted you to know that if any of this rings true - I see you. I know the narrative is that we’re over the worst, that we’re getting on with it and that things are returning to normal but that’s not how it feels on this side of the trenches, right?