16 The Times MagazineYes, the television is inevitably blasting out
iCarly, Project MC^2 or, God forbid, Cocomelon
(please, somebody, SAVE ME). My two kids,
Rose, six, and Thea, two, are usually hurling
themselves – and all the cushions – off the
sofa, laughing, their microwaved chicken
nugget dinner in hand, a trail of crumbs in
their wake. And yes, it’s unrelenting chaos,
day after freaking day.
But surely they’ve noticed me, a smiling,
crumbling woman – their mother – yelling
at the top of her lungs about, I don’t know,
everything? Fine but not fine, hyper-
functioning but falling apart, not crying but
crying, screaming – viscerally, body-tremblingly
so – but, oh right, not in fact out loud.
Don’t get me wrong, I long to let every
single frustration out – and yell without
stopping about the 17 times a day I have to
vacuum the house, the constant “I’m hungry”
cries, the home schooling, the full-time
working, the full-time parenting while full-
time working, the never going to the toilet or
having a bath without an audience, the fact
that I have zero personal space any more,
even at 2am, when at least one of my children
has climbed into bed with my husband and
me and is elbowing me in the face. But I can’t
decide whether I’m more terrified that I won’t
be able to put myself back together again
afterwards, or that my never-ending scream
will have terrified the children and effed up
bedtime. Although even bedtime feels like a
meaningless word these days.
Am I OK? Honestly, I don’t know any
more. Every single day I wake up, get the kids
dressed (or not), sometimes brush their teeth,
maybe brush their hair, make their breakfast,
make the beds, pack their lunches, lose my
sanity trying to get them out of the house so
I can take the eldest to school – we moved
to New York about five months before the
pandemic hit, and the primary schools opened
on a hybrid model (half home, half in school)
in October. Usually at least one of them is
having a tantrum. One time my youngest
refused to wear a nappy, so I carried herdown the road as she peed on my arms
through her trousers.
Then I come home again, do some laundry,
start my actual paid job as executive editor of
Glamour US, attempt to have at least three
Zooms without being interrupted by one
or other child, try to remember to take my
AirPods out when I’m putting the toddler for
her nap so my colleagues don’t have to hear
me baby-talk, try not to lose my temper on
camera in a meeting when I spy the six-year-
old walking around the house bashing things
with a hammer she’s found in the toolbox,
stress over the work I haven’t managed to get
to because of the constant distractions, bath
the kids, make dinner, fail at bedtime (they
want my husband, who’s often working), drink
wine, sit on the sofa, catch up on work, watch
crap TV, doomscroll for hours for no reason
whatsoever, feel too numb to cry, sleep at
some point in the early hours. Wake up. Go
again. And again. And again.
This is our life. Our home functions, even
overfunctions, because I can’t bring myself to
stop, almost too afraid to find out what the
pause might reveal. The kids are feral. My
husband and I are feral. We both have
demanding jobs, his with particularly long and
less family-friendly hours. He wants to be
more involved every day. He can’t. It falls to
me. We have great times. We have bad times.
We fight, but we still laugh. I’m happy, I think.
I’m also lucky, so damn lucky, to have a family,
to have such life in my house, to have the
thousands of bonus hours with my kids, to
be healthy, to have friends. It’s also my job
to raise my children, for better or for worse.
But right now, I’m coming apart at the
seams. As, I would venture, are millions of
other parents around the world – because
this hasn’t just been going on for a few weeks.
It’s been 12 solid, unrelenting months of a
pandemic parenting crisis – one that is
disproportionately affecting mothers, myself
included. Because no matter the apparent
advancements in equality, no matter how
many strides forward we believed we’d made,when the chips are down, it’s mothers who are
expected to step up, or into, the often outdated
and unbalanced roles in family life. We’ve
become full-time teachers, cooks, babysitters
and cleaners – an impossible ask at the best of
times – while also, for a lot of us, juggling full-
time work and the presently impossible
distractionless hours our roles demand.
The impact has been shattering. In the
UK, working women saw their wages decline
by more than 12 per cent during 2020, nearly
double the drop for men. In April 2020,
LinkedIn data showed that female hiring
reached its lowest point, just weeks after the
pandemic was declared – a depressing signifier
of big business attitudes towards women in
a global crisis. A landmark survey of nearly
20,000 mothers by advocacy group Pregnant
Then Screwed revealed that 15 per cent of
working mums had been made redundant orRecently, two or three times a week perhaps,
I’ve found myself standing in the middle of
my living room at the end of a working day
wondering why no one can hear me scream.
HAIR AND MAKEUP: EMILY AMICK USING MAC COSMETICS