Lockdown rant

[MrsJonesAndMe]

Does anyone want to join me in a virtual scream or vent?

Day 80 of the "new normal" - just the phrase makes me want to scream.

I know circumstances will be different for everyone.

For me, I go round in circles of feeling guilty because we are physically and financially OK, but boy this is hard!

Work, "school" the house and the endless walk to the park because there's nothing else to do

I've even got Mumsnetty or for breakfast or unMumsnetty hugs ((())) instead if you prefer.

Here! I do know why it's needed but I'm fed up!

This is shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

"Easing of lockdown" means that the only difference in our lives is that we can drive to a different park to walk past a different padlocked playground. I can look forwards to taking my children to a beer garden even though its too "dangerous" to take them to school.

I have no fear of a virus that is so low in the community. There is a 1:3.5/100,000 chance (and falling) of encountering a person with the virus in my city, let alone a chance of spending 15+ minutes with them within 2m or in an enclosed, poorly ventilated space to have a significant risk of catching it. These odds do not justify denying my children access to an age appropriate education.

I have no structure to my life. Nothing definite to look forwards to for months now. I am done. I'm not depressed, just depressed and worn out at this situation and how hyperbolic voices screaming about the seventh second wave that still isn't coming still being listened to despite the evidence in the UK and faster easing in Europe not providing the evidence to support such scaremongering.

This is unjustifable now.

"Easing of lockdown" means that the only difference in our lives is that we can drive to a different park

Count yourself lucky you have a car, honestly.

New normal my arse none of this is normal .the.phrase really gets on wick!

My eye twitches all the time, can feel cold sores starting and felt like I might have a heart attack from the stress of trying to cut myself in 3 yesterday.

Oh yes @tectonicplates I feel very lucky to have a car. It wasn't about a race to the bottom. Everyone is finding it hard.

It's like people who live on the their own - must be hard, but it's not easy to suddenly have the whole household cooped up together for weeks on end either!

People cope with it differently. My neighbour has not been out at all, other than in the garden and yet she seems perfectly happy. We’ve been for walk where we live and I’m sick of the same three routes.

Perhaps some have more robust mental health, but I can honestly say that there hasn’t been a single day that I’ve enjoyed in the last three months.

Another reason for such frustration is that whenever there's a thread like this, I'm always expecting someone to come along and say "Look, the lockdown is there to save lives and protect the NHS! It's a lockdown for a reason!"

Yes, we already know! We're allowed to care about the situation and also feel frustrated at the same time! It doesn't mean we don't support the NHS.

It is becoming harder.
I keep reading articles about the virus becoming weaker or not existing in its original form any more and I’m so hopeful.
I can’t wait for the end of lockdown and no more virus threat.

Agree, this lockdown has taken me to such depths of despair, and the way I deal with life to keep happy and mentally stable have gone. Opening up more social contact can't happen soon enough.

We have very different experiences of lockdown in the same house here.

I'm on mat leave and I'm due back to work in just over 3 weeks. I'm sad that I've missed doing lots of things with DS that I'd looked forward to. He's likely to be our only child so that's it. Once I'm back at work I'll never spend this long with him again and we spend a good chunk of it in the house. I also didn't really get much time alone just the 2 of us because DH has been furloughed. Of course it's nice to see more of him but I liked the time just me and DS too. I'm not allowed to say that though because maternity leave is just for recovering from birth and bonding and I've been able to do both of those things. My treatment for PND and any support I was receiving has disappeared completely.

DH however is quite enjoying lockdown. He's had months more with DS than he was expecting and is on 80% pay which is more than he would have had on paternity pay. He's been here to see DS start weaning and now that he's starting to work on sitting he can watch and help him with that. He's in hospitality and we live in Scotland so I'll be back at work before him.

I have been OK up until this week. I'm now feeling very bleak about things, although this is probably due to a complete inability to sleep. Went to bed at 8pm last night but was still wide awake at 1am eating chocolate biscuits and drinking diet coke, which obviously wasn't going to help matters.

DH was made redundant in November, his industry is very niche and on the decline so finding something else, (especially aged 53), was going to be hard enough, it's nigh on impossible at the moment. Our marriage has been in trouble for many, many years but his complete lack of drive, determination and effort to look for anything else has now got me seeing red and I can't stand to be in the same room as him.

DC in Y6 is back at school, but the Y3 is still home schooling, she's bored, missing her friends and being very difficult. Both spend far too many hours on screens.

All our holidays have been cancelled and there really feels like there is nothing to look forward to. I've not had a face to face conversation with anyone outside my household since March.

We are all well and my job is secure, we have some savings but DH's reluctance to find another job means they are getting eaten into.

I'd like to get in my car and drive a long way away

It's shit. It's really shit. Balancing home working and schooling. I was holding on to a glimmer of hope that we would get some respite before the summer holidays with the schools reopening but that's been thrown under a bus, along with our kids rights to an education.

I've fallen out with my mother over my decision to send my daughter back to nursery because she has gone full apocalypse about the situation and I can't deal with her hysterics and passive aggressive Facebook posts anymore.

My eldest is seriously miserable and fed up.

So this morning I took matters into my own hands and suggested to a friend that we form a household bubble to share childcare and take the load off each other. Thankfully she said yes. I think both of us think the ongoing lockdown is ridiculous now. So much for "flattening the curve".

It's NOT a new normal. It's a TEMPORARY normal.

It's also the biggest brainwashing and gaslighting exercise by the government ever. While I don't deny the virus and danger are there, the way the government are trying to hoodwink us at every turn is despicable. They're cunningly making themselves as unaccountable as possible by not allowing us to do stuff; they're waiting for us to break the roolz. I suggest we do this more quickly, to show that we're not as docile and blindly obedient as they think we are. They're trying to appear to be reasonable by saying things like "hey there, you can now travel further for exercise", while keeping the public toilets shut, so you can't really.

All the good things in life have been forcibly snatched away, supposedly for the greater good. We should be out there playing sport and swimming, but the doctor (the same doctor who told us we're all too fat) has ordered us to loaf around at home.

One side-effect of this is that we will become a nation of hypochondriacs, and not in a way that's good for mental health; we will become terrified when we start coughing. The much-deified NHS will be full of the worried well.

I remember loathing government with a passion at the age of seventeen (for bringing in tuition fees, and cynically doing it very soon after being elected, after promising us the moon on a stick). I wonder what the youth of today will think of government, as they've been thrown under the bus and been given an extremely low priority?

and

It's bloody awful and it gets worse every day. At the beginning I was all 'stiff upper lip' and 'keeping my chin up' but now I have lost all motivation to do anything at all, and I am struggling majorly with working, homeschooling and housekeeping all at once

It's fucking shit and I am so in.

Another day done and dusted, with no feeling of achievement and nothing to look forward to - oh except for rain tomorrow and Thursday

Getting fed up of it in the extreme now.
Every day is the fucking same. I'm furloughed, so it's even more the same, and I don't even know if I'll have a job to go back to - probably not.
This was supposed to be the year I got my career back on track after drifting post kids, I'll now be lucky to have any job at all and I'm not getting any younger.

I'm being a rebel this weekend and travelling to stay with family in another city because I just can't bear the thought of another boring weekend doing fuck all and having the kids whingeing.

Tis a bit wank, I'll agree. I just want to get out of bed in a morning, get ready and go to work. But I cant because I've been on furlough since bloody forever.
My DC don't want to do anything. Walk 😫 play on the garden 😫 They want to go back to school!
Even going shopping, que here que there. Fuck off with it!
Single mum, 2 kids. I'm worn out.

New normal? Stop the world, i want to get off..

I get it, I understand why. But sorry 2020, its a no from me. I'm out!

Its really starting to grind my gears

Fuck, i need something to look forward to apart from my food delivery arriving! aaaaaargh..

Not sleeping, losing weight as i cant be arsed to eat, i can walk up the road to nowhere or down the road to nowhere, not even a view just hedges and more hedges here in rural Wales. No work, and newly single at 56..

I've seriously had enough now!

I'm finding it hard going today.

I want my eyebrows done. I want my hair done. I don't feel like myself and yes it's trivial but I'm like a tabby tiger FFS.

I'm weirdly loving it. Life feels a lot simpler and more chilled.
I am lucky not to have to home school though.

Ease the lockdown seems to me to mean

Allow men - especially but not solely middle class men get back to (important) lives (golf, fishing, work and soon pubs). Give their wives something to get them off their backs (garden centres) and throw the single parents, teens and children under the bus.

I love garden centres - but I don't for one minute think they were opened on my behalf.

I know the economy needs to get moving but ffs on what planet is public transport an acceptable risk but kids going to school, or to a playground and families (who are all obeying the rules) getting together inside even dangerous now.

Me too. It’s the not having anything to look forward to that’s the killer. Plus the sense that everything, including children’s education and normal activity that gives life purpose and meaning is indefinitely on hold. I’ve come to the view that we should by and large now revert to doing what we did before lockdown. There was and always will be a risk of oneself or one’s loved ones catching an extremely nasty illness like Coronavirus but that - and other equally threatening risks - always existed didn’t they? All our lives hang by the slimmest of threads at all times - anyone can be knocked down by a car, be caught up in a terrorist attack, be diagnosed with terminal cancer, catch a life threatening illness without notice at any time no matter what precautions you take. We should be allowed to go back to something very similar to the “old” normal but accept we need to be as careful as we reasonably can. The coronavirus will not go away anymore than influenza or AiDS or Sars will disappear. We have to accept that it exists, is another illness that is out there and we live our lives around it.

I'm clinging to some sort of hope that the clowns government will suddenly announce that more things will be back than they originally said, perhaps on 4th July; they just don't want to say it in advance, because they think that people will then break every rule in the book, or they'll have egg on their faces if they have to retract such a promise; it looks like they're trying to avoid this risk as much as possible. (Schools were an exception - I think they had no intention of fully allowing the schools back this month, they just wanted to appear to be trying, and test the public mood, so they can say later "we tried to let the schools back in June, but parents/teachers/unions were not on our side".) It's this almost total refusal of theirs to outline an exit plan that is really galling; it feels like treating us like children, and I wrote to my MP about the lack of plan some weeks ago. Even if they qualified it with "as long as there is no increase in infection", that might help the public's mental health.

And I'm not even looking forward to the shops being open, with all the bloody QUEUEING which is certain to go with it.