Planning? No thanks, I’ve given up
The homework we were set in the webinar this week was to create a schedule or plan, using an online calendar app. I felt resistant to say the least. In the last few weeks and days we have all had our plans trampled — nay danced — on by the wicked stilettos of fate. The idea of making a plan for the next week made me feel physically sick.
I have been planning though. The night before Home School opened its reluctant doors I stuck a massive piece of card onto a wardrobe door, at child height, which coincidentally is the same height as me collapsed in a trembling heap. It bears the legend ‘What Will We Do Today? — — -day. With a space for a card marked Mon/Tues/Wednes etc. to be blue-tacked on. Then beneath, the hours 7am to 7pm are lain out, each with a line to itself. I like seeing them like this, forced disingenuously into their equal spaces, when I know only too well that, in reality, some will bloat to vague ‘returnity’ — a term my daughter seems to have coined, while others will slip by barely noticed.
The idea was to get the children involved, each night, at the scheduled hour of 6–7pm, in planning in some things in their next day, to get them on board with the family plans and give them a sense of a secure structure. It’s a nice idea and to some extent it has worked. But I can’t help feeling that at the moment, planning is a bit of a joke. The days themselves, so far, have borne as little relation to the plan on the wall as anyone’s vision of 2020 did to the one they actually had. And to me, this is not a failure, it is in fact testament to our ability to roll with the punches of what the day brings us. Which so far has been mostly a lot of last minute barely comprehensible and overwhelming edicts from the school, and our own scattered mess of emotional reactions and their continuing ripples each to the next. For example, not once on the chart does it mention ’11 til 12, Shout at the children, throw exercise book across the room (2 mins), spend the rest of the hour mopping up the fallout.’ And yet this is often how things actually pan out. There have often been surprise delights too, but nothing we could have planned. If I have managed to do any of my own work, or indeed anything I’ve found beneficial to me personally, it has been by happy accident, and the only credit I can take for what I have achieved, is in my agility in carping whatever bits of the diem were capriciously strewn within range of my hungry grasp.
As this week continued, I have thought more and more about the difficulties of planning at the moment. It really feels like I am set up to fail on this one. The school expects us as parents to be able to change our own plans at the drop of a hat: work is only posted up after 8am so you cannot print things out the night before, timings for livestream teaching are often only give to us half an hour before they are starting, and are later changed at the last minute. I am not blaming the school for this because they are themselves operating under difficult circumstances, but it makes a joke of me making any sort of a schedule for myself. This is Mummy’s schedule: get up early, do what you can before anyone else wakes, and as soon as they do, be at their beck and call until they’ve finally fallen asleep. Our family runs on this type of responsive, reactive, improvisational method. It’s no way to run a country, particularly in a pandemic, but at the scale of a family with ever-changing needs, it is a way to ensure these are being met. What it does not nurture are the desires for a woman to move forward with any control over her personal development, including a journey back to work. Especially work that would involve prioritising the needs of others over those in her family.
In the meantime, I do think it is possible for me to schedule in a few priorities that seem important — particularly those for wellbeing, as our trainer Annie suggested. Monday nights are sacrosanct for my yoga class, and my partner is on bedtime duty then. This week we are trying to schedule in a walk outside before homeschool every morning, in the hope this will make the day go more smoothly as we will all have had a bit of fresh air. We didn’t manage it yesterday and last night they were up too late to make this morning’s walk a likelihood. But we’re only on Tuesday, it’s still possible to make the morning walk a majority success this week. This is the kind of blind optimism I’m trying to cultivate, and the only kind of planning that is going to work around here right now.
