As I write this, I am dragging my wailing three-year-old from under my desk, so that my six-year-old can get through her Maths assignments from last week, which reminds me how far we are behind – so much so that we had to bunk the Zoom class meeting this morning. Lunchtime is here, and I have sent out only four emails, had one meeting and finished two Maths worksheets. There is still the entire afternoon to go, and I am exhausted. 

I am one of millions of middle-class parents in lockdown with their children, bemoaning the never‑ending stream of emails and Zoom invites from overzealous schools; the smiling YouTube soccer moms and their homemade, glitter play‑dough recipes; the eternal cycle of dishes and laundry, laundry and dishes; the fact that our homes resemble SU men's dorm rooms; the completely bizarre social pressure to jog around the house or learn permaculture or Mandarin; the need to help our children make sense of this strange and malevolent time, while attending to the triggering of our own mental health challenges; and simultaneously holding down our regular full‑time jobs 'from home' – the place I describe above. All of this while knowing that I am extremely privileged. 

My family and I have a safe and healthy environment in which to spend the lockdown period, my children can play in a garden, we have enough food, we are able to pay our bills, we have medical aid, we can continue our children's education, and we can settle down with a mug of Milo and Netflix when the kids finally go to sleep tonight. Most of our fellow citizens do not have it this good, not even close. 

There has been a lot of talk about how this virus is laying the fault lines of our society bare. I would argue that they are impossible to ignore, even for those of us who choose to do so on a daily basis. The folks in Kayamandi did not need a pandemic to let them know that access to basic life‑sustaining needs such as food and healthcare are grossly unequally distributed in this country. The young man from a rural Eastern Cape village did not need COVID-19 to let him know that the internet is not universally accessible. It did not take this lockdown for women in abusive relationships or many young LGBTQ+ folk to recognise that their homes and families are not safe. All these 'revelations' are only news to the privileged. 

And so I find myself feeling a) completely overwhelmed and strung out, and b) like a pampered middle-class princess. To quote my husband, “How could we go into lockdown without couscous?!"  I do not know how to reconcile these realities, because within the narrow confines of our privileged lives, contradictions are at work. Even though my husband is 'awoken' and shares much of the work, the bulk of childcare and domestic responsibilities falls to me. The mental burden of the children's schedules and needs, responding to their emotional vagaries, lays primarily with me, the primary care-giver. Remembering when to change the sheets or do the washing (because our three-year-old is on his last pair of underpants) or use those tomatoes before they go bad, that is my job too.  As a survivor of domestic abuse and violent crime, my anxiety about the 'danger' of the world is in overdrive. I find myself rallying between caffeinated rage-bunny (fight) and anaesthetised-sloth (flight) modes, with what feels like little to no control. As some of my colleagues spend the time writing and/or reading and/or whatever people without children do, I am up to my eyeballs in Grade 1 Maths and a three‑year-old who is desperately sad and angry, and talks about death all day. This does not seem to be a productive time for me. Whether it should be is the subject for another debate.

So what are we to do? Well, the best we can, I suppose. I am reminded at this time of Maya Angelou's words: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." I can only believe that when the worst of this pandemic is over, we will know and do better.