Working parents – Why does not feel like it’s getting better?

[Anonymous]

I think a lot of us are burned out. I’m now making fun weekend plans for the whole family. We are also doing more outdoorsy type of activities… and that has helped everyone in the family recharge.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The depth of the pandemic, with the kids home for online school and trying to work and run a school at a daycare, be short order cook, all of that. Was horrible. On top of that, worry about getting sick and maybe one of us stone, some of us are high risk

No life is almost back to normal, and the kids are going to school, they do some activities for nothing insane, and now we get to work from home most days. In many ways it should be better, but I feel like the dishes are always piled up, the house is always a mess, and we are more burned out than ever.

Maybe we were just frogs in a pot of water, I didn’t realize how tough it was before the pandemic and then with that lull when life was returning to normal but not quite made us not prepared for reality.

I feel you on that. I’m looking right now at a sink of dirty dishes. The playroom is constantly a mess. DH is wonderful, but is starting to travel more, which puts more stress on me to handle everything while he’s gone.

I’m exhausted.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The depth of the pandemic, with the kids home for online school and trying to work and run a school at a daycare, be short order cook, all of that. Was horrible. On top of that, worry about getting sick and maybe one of us stone, some of us are high risk

No life is almost back to normal, and the kids are going to school, they do some activities for nothing insane, and now we get to work from home most days. In many ways it should be better, but I feel like the dishes are always piled up, the house is always a mess, and we are more burned out than ever.

Maybe we were just frogs in a pot of water, I didn’t realize how tough it was before the pandemic and then with that lull when life was returning to normal but not quite made us not prepared for reality.

I feel you on that. I’m looking right now at a sink of dirty dishes. The playroom is constantly a mess. DH is wonderful, but is starting to travel more, which puts more stress on me to handle everything while he’s gone.

I’m exhausted.

I should say starting to travel more again. It was nice having him around for the past 2 years and not have to deal with the work trips, but with his company having folks back into the office, he has to travel to their various locations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think people tend to wildly underestimate the drawbacks of WFH. Yes, you save commute time, but at the expense of no longer having a clear division between work and home life. For most people, working in the office meant they weren’t distracted by the sink full of dishes, the pile of laundry, or other household chores every time they got up to go to the bathroom. When they were at the office, they largely turned off the “home” brain and just focused on work. When they WFH, the mental process of prioritizing and focusing isn’t just about the day’s work tasks, now home chores are competing at every turn because you could take five minutes to start a load of laundry or take ten minutes and wash all the dishes. It requires more mental energy to stay on take than it did in the office.

And then at the end of the day, lots of people aren’t cleanly turning off their computers and going home to focus on home life. They have the computer on the counter next to them while they make dinner, or they skip washing the dishes afterward in favor or knocking out one more work item. It means your brain is pulled in twice as many directions every waking moment than it used to be, and that is exhausting.

OP here, I was thinking something similar. Basically I used to have discrete stressors -- when at work worried about work things, when at home worried about home things, but now I'm worried about twice as much for twice as long (ie every waking hour).

On a teleconference, and go up to get a cup of coffee or lunch (because there is no cafe) and see the pile of dishes or disheveled living room -- maybe I can multitask and clean while I'm on the call, but not all the time but I definitely get reminded of those looming todo items every time I walk by rather than blissfully out of mind while I sit at my tidy office. likewise, i was always behind at work even before, but now I have much more opportunity to put in a little more time rather than doing that pile of dishes in the evening.

For us personally, we have 3 kids in 3 different schools (which is how it has always the way) but my oldest could maybe go to school on their own but they figure a 7th grade can walk 1.3 mile along a busy road rather than getting bus so I'm stuck driving all 3 kids both ways when I had expected the oldest to no longer need a ride.

That’s crazy. Why don’t your kids ride the bus?

We are in “walk zone” for all three schools but it is 1.3 min for middle schooler, 0.7mile for 3rd grader and preschooler is preschooler.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I agree everything feels less manageable. I really don't know why. I have stepped way back at work, kids are older and more independent, but I am still just plain exhausted and burned out.

I agree. I don't know why, but everything just feels a bit shittier compared to pre-COVID. It's kinda strange. Things are (for the most part) back to "normal", but it doesn't feel as good....

Weird.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree everything feels less manageable. I really don't know why. I have stepped way back at work, kids are older and more independent, but I am still just plain exhausted and burned out.

I agree. I don't know why, but everything just feels a bit shittier compared to pre-COVID. It's kinda strange. Things are (for the most part) back to "normal", but it doesn't feel as good....

Weird.

Theories:

1) we all had COVID at some point and were left addle brained

2) meeting fatigue. We have upped our number of meetings, and many with zoom fatigue to boost

3) our life before was carefully constructed as we slowly built systems in place as kids came into our lives. They were halted and now must be rebuilt in new paradigm all at once

4) the blurring of work and home does seem possible too, but my childfree friends seem especially carefree, traveling on a whim etc

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree everything feels less manageable. I really don't know why. I have stepped way back at work, kids are older and more independent, but I am still just plain exhausted and burned out.

I agree. I don't know why, but everything just feels a bit shittier compared to pre-COVID. It's kinda strange. Things are (for the most part) back to "normal", but it doesn't feel as good....

Weird.

I have a toddler in day care, so we're constantly sick with random viruses and still subject to potential quarantines, and for me it's that all the work is back to normal but the fun is absolutely not. We've had to cancel a lot of plans because either someone in our house is sick, or a friend with kids in day care is. Also, we moved from NoVA to a cheaper area in MD and it feels like all our friends here have local family they spend their weekends and breaks with. Having no social life and not much to look forward to is breaking me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I feel the same. I drained a lot of PTO due to lack of childcare, illness, and then moving during the pandemic and still haven't had a chance to take enough of a break to recharge. We've been in our new house for two years this summer and it still looks like we just moved in. My family of origin also fell apart over the past two years and I went from having my parents as a support system to zero support at all - which happens to everyone eventually but amidst everything else I'm really reeling. The way I describe it is I was in a hole nearly six feet under, and even though I've crawled almost all the way out, it's still the same hole and still feels like a hole. I wake up in the morning and the work is still there and the expectations for getting it done don't change.

Me. Too. All this, even the move detail.

[Anonymous]

It is rollerover just like rollover minutes from T-Mobile all that shiz that didnt get done during the pandemic is still hanging on and its snowballed into the normal stuff.

I finally paid for a housecleaner to come today. I got the dog washed and groomed this past weekend. I am getting the carpets cleaned tomorrow. We are paying for someone to do spring clean-up on the yard. I can then focus on deep clean stuff- blinds, window sills, fans, re-caulking, windows, etc. I can ignore the yard until fall and then just do maintenance. I have streamlined our dinner options. I need to re-paint a room we paid someone to do but they did a horrible job and then paint three other rooms....we moved in March 2020 and all these projects have just stalled because of survival mode. I cant afford to outsource everything so I outsource what I am not efficient at or would take me longer to rent and complete than paying someone (ex. carpet cleaning).

There is no reset button from the pandemic and I think we are all just surviving on fumes.

[Anonymous]

If you work from home and your kids are at school, why is your house a mess? Throw in a load of laundry while on a call or dump some stuff in the Crock Pot (use a liner so it's easy to clean).

[Anonymous]

We are still dealing with daycare quarantines for our 2yo. We have had multiple closures of her classroom due to positive caregivers. County health department requires them to shut down for 10 days at a time. Until the mandatory quarantines end and Covid exposures are treated like exposures to RSV, flu, HFM, etc., things won’t be much better for us. DH travels frequently, so I am left juggling full-time work with no childcare.
Fortunately, life for my 6yo is back to normal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree everything feels less manageable. I really don't know why. I have stepped way back at work, kids are older and more independent, but I am still just plain exhausted and burned out.

I agree. I don't know why, but everything just feels a bit shittier compared to pre-COVID. It's kinda strange. Things are (for the most part) back to "normal", but it doesn't feel as good....

Weird.

Theories:

1) we all had COVID at some point and were left addle brained

2) meeting fatigue. We have upped our number of meetings, and many with zoom fatigue to boost

3) our life before was carefully constructed as we slowly built systems in place as kids came into our lives. They were halted and now must be rebuilt in new paradigm all at once

4) the blurring of work and home does seem possible too, but my childfree friends seem especially carefree, traveling on a whim etc

For me, it is 4. And that I now know that apparently society can cease to exist at any point and I will have to be epidemiologist, pediatrician, teacher, babysitter, cleaner, cook, etc for my family while also simultaneously working FT at a technical, intellectual job that pays the bills. I can’t even rely on schools to be open, evidently, and that’s going to take a while to recover from/trust again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you work from home and your kids are at school, why is your house a mess? Throw in a load of laundry while on a call or dump some stuff in the Crock Pot (use a liner so it's easy to clean).

NP and this dismissive, unthinking kind of attitude is part of the whole problem. Have you not been listening to people saying the constant neverending blurring of work and home life is a huge part of the problem? Advising people worn out from constant multitasking to multitask is really tone deaf (to put it kindly).

[Anonymous]

Because capitalism is designed to take up any slack in the system and monetize it and funnel it to the owner class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you work from home and your kids are at school, why is your house a mess? Throw in a load of laundry while on a call or dump some stuff in the Crock Pot (use a liner so it's easy to clean).

NP and this dismissive, unthinking kind of attitude is part of the whole problem. Have you not been listening to people saying the constant neverending blurring of work and home life is a huge part of the problem? Advising people worn out from constant multitasking to multitask is really tone deaf (to put it kindly).

So ignore everything all day and do it after the kids go to bed. The first option sounds much better to me.