Working from home? No problem, I do that all the time! Keep away from other people? Yep, don’t get out much anyway. Work from home whilst all the IT systems are imploding, your team need supporting in the transition and you spend upwards of 5 hours a day on the phone, your 3 year old is a whiny chicken pox covered monster and you’re tag teaming childcare with your partner between conference calls and your body is basically telling you it wants to die and due to social distancing you can’t go out or do anything to destress? Huh. This is..tricky

And as of next week, we also have the 6 year old at home. Schools are closed, we don’t know how long for. We have zero clue if we will be able to complete on the house we exchanged on last week. We have a confirmed space at a new school near the new house but no clue how the transition will work since all schools are now closing.

I don’t think I have ever felt this anxious or unsure about things but I know that everyone else is feeling the same, and many are in much worse positions than us. At least we have relatively secure jobs that we can do from home (with some juggling) and kids that are young enough that we can get by with winging home schooling. Although I did have to message our neighbour yesterday to reassure her that I wasn’t murdering my 3 year old, there was just a Splinter Incident.

I don’t function well when worrying about things I can’t control, it’s one the reasons my illness has been so hard to deal with – there is no simple answer. So I’m focusing on figuring out what I can control and dealing with that. Firstly, my husband and I need to figure out this childcare/working from home lark. We are creating a weekly planner showing when we absolutely need to be locked away focused on work, so the other needs to be with the kids and working out a loose structure to the week in terms of when we will be doing some kind of home schooling VS endless hours of iPads or Netflix (we will NOT be obsessing about screens). Aaand…. I’ve just realised that’s as far as I’ve got.

Tbh, tonight has mostly been about chugging wine and endless WhatsApp conversations with people who are also chugging wine and in various levels of shock and despair about everything that’s happening. This whole thing is completely unprecedented, no one is quite sure what to do, how to act, what the hell is coming next so quite honestly I feel like wine with friends (albeit virtually) is the best option right now and the rest of it I will figure out another day.

Good luck to everyone else out there also navigating this New Abnormal.