No, I don’t know where your f***ing pen is…. and other tales from home schooling.

I open this tale with an image. An image of me, twitching away in a corner as my daughter tells me that she simply can not do her homework on rivers. It is IMPOSSIBLE, she tells me. She has looked EVERYWHERE and can not find what she is supposed to be researching. The task her teacher has provided her with, which is to find out how rivers change the shape of the land, is an unreasonable task that she has NO CHANCE of achieving.

This child, my eldest, is an incredibly capable little human. She can cook entire meals from scratch. She can tell you the inner workings of the human anatomy. She has managed to work out the basics of coding, and can expertly navigate her way through any technological challenges when it comes to her iPad, or gaming. I could quite confidently say that should my husband and I suddenly pack our bags and leave (we’ve been tempted), she could last an entire week at least without any input.

So why, pray tell, when given the entire world wide web, is she unable to find one blumin fact about friggin’ rivers???

It’s quite simple really.

She simply. doesn’t. fancy. it.

I, using some wild witchcraft, take approximately 32 seconds to find several YouTube videos, a BBC Bitesize page, and numerous kids web pages all about the wonder that is rivers. I tell her to write a paragraph on it. Ten minutes later, she has written three words : ‘How Rivers Shape….” SHE HASN’T EVEN FINISHED THE BLOODY TITLE I TELL YOU.

While this is going on, my seven year old has lost her pencil for the seventeenth time this morning. Some time ago, she answered that 421-30 is 895. When I looked at her and said “so… when you look at that calculation, does that seem correct?”

She answered, “well yes, but now you’re looking at me like that, I’m not so sure!” That particular child has taught herself to French plait using YouTube videos and can tell you every horse breed that exists. Yet, when I ask her to find a pencil and her workbook she looks at me as if I’m asking her to conduct brain surgery on the dog using only her hair clips.

There’s a a five year old too. She’s “exceeding expectations for her age”, so I’m told. I say I’m ‘told’… With me, she has ignored the ‘phase three phonics picture to word match’ I asked her to do and is instead writing the word ‘POO’ over and over again.

Here’s the thing. The big reason why wine stocks are running low in supermarkets all over the country and why women in their thirties are eating themselves to early diabetes….

Your children behave way worse for you than they do for their teachers.

In scientific studies, it was found that children behave twenty million times worse for their parents than for adults outside of the home.

Ok, maybe that hasn’t been actually scientifically proven, per se. But there is some fact in it. It’s the real trouble with homeschooling, and why we all feel like we’re doing terribly at it. Somehow, our children can attend six hours of school and come home with achievement certificates and stickers and smiley faces. After six hours at the school of Mummy H, the only certificate we have is one certifying our entry into a facility of some sort.

I’m sure there are some of you reading this, feeling smug that you’re perfecting homeschooling and have spent your lockdown days like the Vonn Trapps, singing and congratulating yourselves on the achievements you have made, your children merry in all of the educational joy and wisdom you have imparted on them.

I’m rather suspecting that there are many, many more of you that are feeling stressed and worried that you are doing this allll wrrrooong.

So here’s to us. The ‘trying our best’ parents. Those of us that carry on, every day, trying to teach Phonics and The Stone Age and Rivers to children that would rather be seeing their friends or watching other kids play with toys on YouTube. Here’s to the ones that manage not to poke themselves in the brain with the pencils that our children are incapable of finding for the twentieth time this week. Here’s to the mums whose kids have magically forgotten how to count, to the Dads who are trying not to lose their cool as they remind their five year olds: “SOUND IT OUT, Don’t guess. M-A-T DOES NOT SPELL CARPET” If you’re doing your best, even if it’s not reaping the rewards, just keep going.

One day, this will all be over. Your children won’t remember how many facts they learnt about rivers. They won’t remember how many times they practised their phonics sounds. But they will remember you, and they’ll remember that in a world of chaos: you were doing your best. In your pyjamas.

2020 Babies: You May Never Know.

In 2020, my sister had a baby. Not just any baby, the cutest baby ever. I’m not over-exaggerating. I’m sure your babies are all cute, don’t get me wrong. But this kid, she’s too much. She’s just a beautiful bundle of gorgeous squishiness that has been a ray of glorious sunshine in the dull grey shittiness of 2020.

She has no idea of the year that she was born in. She has literally no clue. How crazy it is that someone would exist in 2020 and not know of the absurdity of the world around her.

My sister had waited until the ‘perfect time’ to have a child. She had finished her degree, started a career she loved, travelled, married a nice man with whom to sire an offspring and with him bought a nice family-raising three bedroom house near the sea. It was the perfect time.

Sadly, 2020 gave zero fucks about the timing she had so cautiously planned into her life.

Instead, at 25 weeks she was forced to leave the school she taught in and work from home and told she would be ‘shielding’. She attended growth scans and midwife appointments on her own while her husband sat in the car. Her nieces, my daughters, never got to cuddle her growing bump and feel their little cousin kicking away. Her pregnancy was spent alone, her maternity leave took the shape of weeks sat in her empty house. And when her baby girl finally did arrive, she would spend her first year seeing humans behind face masks: imagining that outside of her house lived only humans with half face, half coloured fabric.

I’m assuming that by the time my niece is old enough to understand it all, Covid-19 will be a swear word that we refer to as ‘he who has shall not be named’. I’m assuming that by the time she can talk we will no longer be wearing masks to buy bog roll, and will be allowed to stand within less than two metres of others. I say assuming, I’m hoping that’s the case.

And so, she may never know. She may never know how some of us, the few who were lucky enough to meet her in person, met her wearing masks and dousing ourselves in alcohol gel. She will never know that her Mum attended baby groups on zoom, and bought all of her belongings online. She’ll never be aware that her mother googled whether babies should be wearing tiny masks to protect them when they’re out and about. She may never be aware that most of her family were a good two stone heavier than they had been because they had done little for months than sit on their arses watching Tiger King.

And perhaps she may never know how important her arrival was. How she, and other babies born in 2020, were the little chunk of joy we needed in a year of misery and sadness. That they were the good news story in a year of bad news stories.

I said something to her a few weeks ago. She smiled and did a particularly loud fart: which I’m taking to mean she understand and appreciated what I was saying. And I’m saying it now to her and to every 2020 baby, you beautiful, clueless little idiots….. I’m sorry that the world isn’t a little bit more wonderful for you. But thank you. Thank you for making the world a little bit more wonderful for us.