How has it come to this? How? As if having all three children at home like some hideous parody of an eternal rainy bank holiday wasn’t hellish enough, nobody is sparing a thought for those of us whose kids are at private school.
Frankly, anyone posting “resources” in their Instagram stories can piss off
Hell yeah — we’re being emailed the same relentless amount of homeschool shit by teachers as everyone else, but we’re also still expected to pay the fucking fees. For precisely nothing! How is this fair? How? And as per, Will is hiding in his office on constant Zoom meetings while I’m apparently supposed to not only work from home myself but also educate three kids. All of whom have exams in the next two years, and whose entire futures I’m probably sabotaging.
Whose world is it happening in? The pilates mothers who didn’t have a job in the first place, and cried about the Easter Bonnet Parade being cancelled? The lucky sods who already have a live-in tutor self-isolating with them? People with social outcast violin prodigy children? Frankly, anyone posting “resources” in their Instagram stories can piss off. Ditto, mothers who send “lol” memes of fractions-taught-by-wine-pouring to the class WhatsApp group, but who are clearly secretly forcing their kids to do Kumon. You don’t fool me. You’re like the dicks at school who claimed not to have done any revision. In fact, you ARE those dicks, dammit. You are those exact dickish girls, 30 years on. You probably attribute your face to “yoga” too.
Also teachers — for the love of God stop showing off. Nobody is fooled that you produce this number of lesson plans in a normal week. I’m not #grateful and “suddenly amazed by how hard you work”. I can see right through your passive aggressive tactics, actually, and judging by your spelling you could do with some phonics yourself. And another thing: emailing me a link to Joe Wicks on YouTube and calling it “PE” on your cobbled-together timetable is just lazy. This is not what we pay £40,000 a year for. Switching on YouTube is my job.
Ok. Deep breath. No, wait, not finished. Seriously, all you #blessed not-working mums, stop setting up class House Party dates. One of the few perks of this new Armageddon is surely a 24-hour family-wide pyjama policy, and the house reaching new heights of chaos. What am I supposed to do while the cleaner’s self-isolating? Add hob scrubbing and Hoovering to my list of new part-time jobs?
How come the background of everyone else’s house looks presentable? Do they all have housekeepers locked in their basements? I actually wouldn’t put it past some of the parents, especially at Lyra’s oligarch-heavy school.
Possibly most annoying are the constant demands from said school to “send photos of home learning”. The shocking thing is how many mothers do this. Me included. Like a total lemming I forced all three kids to line up in the only tidy corner of the house (spare room) and pretend to be halfway through a Cosmic Kids mindfulness session.
Adding insult to injury, before all this kicked off I spent several hundred pounds on a new summer uniform for Hector. He’s now had a growth spurt and so won’t fit any of it by next summer. Excellent. Will and I are arguing over whether, if school goes back before September, he can wear any of it (the shorts look like grey hotpants). Will’s line is: “I thought you can’t stand all the judgy parents, and don’t care what they think?” Massively missing the point that these are two entirely separate issues. FFS.
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