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Everyday life: the child is sick, the parents cannot work (symbol picture)
Photo: filadendron / E + / Getty Images
Do you know what working parents and their children feel like right now?
Like in Hitchcock's "The Birds".
It's just not a flock of birds attacking us.
They are kindergarten germs.
In addition, the constant guilty conscience of not being able to go to work again, of letting my colleagues down again.
There is no escape.
Sars-CoV-2 is just one of many pathogens, due to quarantine and isolation sometimes the most annoying, sometimes also the one with the fewest symptoms in children.
Many other germs took a break last autumn and winter: When day-care centers and kindergartens closed, they could not spread and are now easy for the small hosts again.
They, in turn, have to fight the fight, their immune system comes back into training.
Close the laptop, put in the feverish juice
For us parents this means: The daycare centers are open, but the children cannot go.
The work laptop stays closed, instead you make tea, wrap your calves in damp towels and apply for a bonus card at the pharmacy.
Recently, the parenting podcast »Mamalauda« posted a bingo card »Teething Edition« on Instagram.
To tick off: hand-foot-mouth, whooping cough, RS virus, scarlet fever, three-day fever, corona, gastrointestinal virus, lice and the flu infection.
We young parents collect diseases like Diddl leaves in the past.
Every day there is a new notice in the day care center: "We currently have cases of ..." Simply insert one of the diseases mentioned.
Three days later the child lies flat first, then the parents two more later, healthy weeks are the exception, not the rule.
Does everything look quite entertaining at first?
You are wrong.
After being sick, tired, drained, and just before the divorce comes silly.
Sometimes it is unbearable otherwise.
The pandemic situation and the consequences that result from it are stressful and drive parents into burnout. First and foremost, of course, is concern about the children, about family life, about one's own health - but also about the job. There are the colleagues who you don't let down, the superiors who you don't want to disappoint. The team cannot catch everything that is left behind. I don't want to be the reason others get stressed; I know from many friends, acquaintances and colleagues that they think the same way. And yet sometimes there is no other way.
The message that I have to report (child) sick today has been saved as a template in my e-mail program for months.
Sometimes it still gets stuck in the drafts folder, instead I get up and work.
At lunchtime or late in the evening when the child is asleep - the home office makes it possible, in many other jobs that is not even possible.
So the full-time child job is followed by the real one.
But then the apartment is not yet clean and the laundry has not been washed.
The guilty conscience plagues all the time: Am I doing justice to the child, my own demands, my colleagues?
more on the subject
Families in the pandemic: Why are politics ignoring us? Jens Radü's parents column
The Corona school disaster: "How should you paint when you're crying?" Markus Deggerich's parents column
Vaccinations of children: When the corona denier sits in the classroom Jens Radü's parents column
There has been a lot of talk about what parents have to shoulder in this pandemic.
As a concession, there was a child bonus of 300 euros, instead of 20, you are entitled to child sickness benefit for 30 days.
There are also employers who give their employees fully paid child sick days.
All of this is right and important - but a mistake in thinking, because the work is left standing, the responsibility that we take on with our jobs does not disappear.
It's also about, but not just about money.
Understanding is not a given
A friend recently told me about a colleague who sat across from her crying and sobbing: "I just want to work." goes to daycare, plays with his friends, the parents work and they call it a day. As a self-employed person you do not lose: r no income, and as an employee: r you don't have to constantly tell your superiors that something has been delayed or ask your colleagues without children to take over something. It sounds like a utopia from a long forgotten time.
The friend, by the way, simply listened to the colleague.
She is a mother herself and said the only right thing: "I understand you!" No rolling eyes, no anger at the colleague who is missing again.
Just understanding.
And as exhausting as the situation may be, understanding helps most, at least in the first step.
This is by no means a matter of course, from my circle of friends I know dozens of stories about moaning superiors and colleagues who just don't understand - and thus create even more pressure.
And you can also save yourself the question of whether your father can't even take care of himself.
It's also his turn, but nobody notices when the mother is working.
If parents feel alone with their burden, then as colleagues and superiors - with or without a child - at least take away from them the feeling of being bad, annoying, unusable employees.
Understand.
Also for the fact that others cannot absorb everything.
We should have learned long ago that the pandemic poses extreme challenges for all of us, of very different kinds. That it does not help us to balance our suffering and stress against each other.
We have to rethink the pressure to perform, shift down a gear.
Instead of more, less is just possible.
