Being Overwhelmed during this time

May 09, 2020 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

In my last letter I urged parents to think of the Lockdown as a Master’s Programme in simply chilling. After my last letter, a friend extended thanks for the read, saying she was much less overwhelmed and it was at that moment, I realised, that’s what we are all feeling now, admittedly or not: overwhelmed!
Life worldwide and moreso, in Guyana right now is so overwhelmingly uncertain… Emotionally we worry about family and friends getting Covid-19, going from cautious to nervous to panicked at rapid speed. The more you read … the harrowing photographs of Italian hospitals, America’s unpreparedness, what to do and not to do… possible treatments.… Local journalists and Banks DIH employees sharing stories… amidst the usual Elections ludicrousness going on for two months now…. Get on with it already!
It’s demanding, emotional and terribly overwhelming. For me and many others, managing the threat of the virus is adding a new and significant dose of domestic and emotional stress to our lives. What makes this anxiety much worse is its disruption of our daily routines combined with a deeper uncertainty as to how it will play out.
How long will our children be out of school? How will we go to work, get job done and earn money to pay our several bills? Managing children and a house is work. The logistical anxieties are far more severe for parents who are also caring for an elderly parent.
At the center of our anxiety sits all the unknowns, which are extremely difficult to reason through. For one, our understanding of the virus and how it functions is extremely limited, and there are new findings every day.
Parents, I realise that we need to try to take breaks from the news, and put our family’s risk in perspective. This will be hard on this digital age but we need to try anyway. It is important for us as parents to protect our mental health, because children can be traumatised by a parent’s anxiety.
While our children may be feeling nervous to some degree, those whose schools are cancelled are moreso likely to be unsettled. Children thrive on stability and routine and when those go away, it is up to parents to model how to cope. To survive, we all need to both commit ourselves to some sense of order, and at the same time, yield to the chaos.
Parents, I urge you to do what you need to do to lower your stress levels…. maybe ease up on your television and video game policy. Create some structure that you can realistically commit to and on most days, achieve, and importantly, make sure you are enjoying some parts of it.
At our end, we are very lucky to have supplies, a garden and lots of activities and projects we kept meaning to tackle to keep us going. However, the thing we miss most by far is people ― My son is still too young to understand what’s happening and his interactions with others are now limited to video chats. He however clearly misses the ‘normalcy’ and asks to play with his cousins and stay with his grandparents.
I leave you with a beautiful idea I read about which in turn I hope readers can try in their respective homes. I will certainly start this from tomorrow. A mom was talking about coping mechanisms with her active children and said: “Every time we wish we could do something, go somewhere, treat ourselves, see someone we love, visit a new place, invite people to visit us, we’re going to write it down on a post it note and put it in a jar. When all this is over this will be our bucket list and we’ll work our way through the jar and be more grateful than ever for the little and lovely things in our lives. Until then we’ll enjoy watching the jar fill up with magical things to look forward to.”
So to everyone who’s really feeling overwhelmed at the moment, hang in there and stay strong. Try the magic jar! It is all we really have right now ― hope that our loved ones will all be okay and that we will survive this and that one day soon we can see the people we love and do the things we love. That is what this is all about: documenting all of those precious things we take for granted and when we come to taking them back out of the jar, they will mean so much more to us.
Stay well and safe parents!

Sincerely,
Mommy V

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