Corona diary of a mother
Families as the nation’s stress hotspot: “Where is our Corona emergency brake ???”
© Jelena Stanojkovic / Shutterstock
The incidences are rising again – and with them the stress level in families. Like all mothers, our author has been holding out for over a year. But that won’t work for a long time.
I sit with tired eyes in front of the news. So a federal emergency brake is the latest achievement on the way to a better world. From an incidence of 100, certain measures take effect so that the health system is not overloaded. During the weather forecast, I wander around and review my day. Worrying about my normally balanced 9-year-old girl who has been so bitter for a few weeks and says sentences like: “I wish I would live in a different time and not now.” The argument with the teen, which shouldn’t escalate like it did again today. The tears of the first grader because his friends are all in the other group of the alternating class and then the baby, which has finally been touched by a stranger for weeks today – for vaccination. I get dizzy from all the thoughts and a question booms in my head: Where is OUR emergency brake? Which measures are effective for families when the burden becomes too great? When can families finally go into a stress lockdown in which they can breathe a sigh of relief from the huge incidence of stress?
You have to know your gas station
I consider my family as a construct and each and every one of us to be very resilient. We have already endured a lot together and always found strategies to stay healthy and happy alone and together. If everyone knows their own “petrol station” and you enjoy nice moments together, then so much cannot go wrong. At least that’s how I’ve always felt, but I had never thought about what would happen when all our gas stations close and six over-the-top people meet during the moments we shared. These moments are often no longer nice. Everyone tries to somehow keep their heads above water, unfortunately that often has little to do with family quality time. We used to sing together in the car, today at least one of us complains that he has a headache and wants some rest. We used to laugh so much, today we’re happy when nobody is crying or complaining.
As many survival strategies as there are people in a house
I recently talked to a family therapist and he got the problem right to the point: “When people are stressed, they always fall into their very own patterns. In times of stress it is very difficult to act consciously and sensibly. You drive your own personal survival strategy, even if it is completely stupid and you know it for sure. ” I’m afraid he’s right. The more different people are under one roof, the crazier it gets when EVERYONE is stressed. For us it looks something like this: the baby cries, the first grader finds everything and everyone mean and therefore begins to annoy everything and everyone. The 9-year-old becomes hysterical because she was annoyed, the teenage girl falls into peacock-like, inviolable arrogance, the man mutates into a field marshal and I fall into a deep hole of self-pity, out of which I crawl up again at some point, scolding and cursing. That sounds pretty broken, but the truth is: After more than a year of Corona, every family is sure to know these everyone-is-completely-over-the-top.
What families really need
When the first Corona child benefit was paid out, we were still thinking: “Oh, come on, it doesn’t have to be. Everything’s fine! Others need it more urgently!” Today I laugh at the amount, because it has long been spent on electricity and homeschooling equipment. But more money is still not what most families need right now. What we need more urgently are open schools and daycare centers with good hygiene concepts. We need vaccinated grandparents who can give us a helping hand and contact restrictions that do not deny us the last possible means of support. We need flexible emergency care that can sometimes be used at short notice when the nerves are completely bare and we need a perspective as to when parents will be vaccinated. Right now, most of us are the last to go. But from experience I can say: Having Corona and at the same time taking care of children completely isolated from the outside world requires almost superhuman superpowers!
Every elevator has more rights than parents
If this country wants to continue to build on healthy people from healthy families, then this valuable construct “family” should finally come into focus. It cannot be that the obligation to work from home is asking too much, but that children and parents sometimes have to study, teach and work from home for months. That this seems reasonable is a mystery to me. Every elevator, every car and every bridge has a fixed load limit that must not be exceeded. It is no different with families, only that this limit is not on our foreheads. But maybe that would be very good, because let me tell you one thing: “Infinite” would then be for no one! Even if the world seems to have been thinking that since March 2020.
This article originally appeared on Eltern.de.