Life is too short to go back to way things were before Covid
‘IF LIFE before this was ‘normal’, I don’t want to go back,” I say, very seriously, to my boyfriend. He tells me I’m talking like someone from the Moonies. I’m not alone in thinking like this. LinkedIn is even adding ‘stayat-home mom’ and ‘dad’ as a proper job title, as more and more parents exit the workforce.
Being able to raise your own children had become a luxury few millennial moms thought we could afford until the pandemic hit and we were all forced to stop outsourcing our childcare to strangers. Twelve months and forever ago, we all worked in offices, showing up every morning after dropping the kids to day care. Someone else cleaned our house every other Thursday morning.
Then we were forced into becoming stay-at-home parents, and I’d wager a guess that the 94pc of us who told a recent survey we would like to work remotely “some or all of the time” when the Covid crisis ends, have seen the benefits of mothering like it’s 1951 and don’t want to ever go back to the workplace.
The world keeps telling us that being at home 24/7 is hard. How are you surviving, my next-door neighbour asks – as if the only options for enforced parenting are steely reserve and a vat of Valium. But I‘ve found as the months have slipped by that this enforced hunkering down with family has been a liberation.
I know now that I don’t ever want to go back to how things were. I know that I don’t want to work five days a week after this. I don’t want weekends to be jam-packed full of activities. I don’t want to have that ‘ships in the night’ feeling, which can so often happen when everyone’s schedule is too hectic.
I don’t want to miss the endless feeding, bathing, teeth brushing, and book reading. I don’t want to miss those soft squishy perfect smelling little bodies as they settle in for sleep. This past year has been depressing in almost every way, except the glorious time it’s given us to spend with those we live with.
I know I am lucky to be able to work from home. I know how lucky I am to have a home. I know I am lucky to have a family I love and loves me back. But having been forced away from the drudgery of the office I want and need more flexibility in choosing where and how I work.
Irish people embraced the working from home lark eagerly. By mid 2020, we had one of the highest rates of working from home in Europe – over 40pc, according to the Living, Working and Covid-19 e-survey, carried out by Eurofound.
Ninety-four per cent of respondents to the National Remote Working Survey were in favour of working remotely on an on-going basis for “some or all of the time” when Covid ends, and over 80pc in a recent Amárach poll expressed a preference for a hybrid working arrangement.
Lockdown hasn’t been all bad. Respondents to a CSO survey at the end of last year were asked whether anything in their lives had changed for the better since the Covid-19 outbreak and if they answered positively, they were asked what aspects had improved. Nearly 45pc of respondents reported that something in their lives had changed for the better.
Almost three in 10 said spending “more quality time with the people they live with” is an aspect of their lives that has changed for the better.
Before Covid, how many of us were out working because we felt we had to? Sure, for super high earners, the maths favour staying in your job. But for the rest of us, the costs associated with childcare and commuting almost cancel our monthly pay cheque.
In fact, most couples will find that, given the staggering cost of childcare in Ireland, and the crippling tax, they’d be better off with one of them staying home instead. Figures show that a mom of two living in Dublin would need to earn around €30,000 a year just to fund the cost of childcare.
I’d say more and more of us will continue to find ways to be at home more with our children in an immunised future even when others expect us not to. When this horror show is over – and soon it will be over – I hope that we won’t have to make up excuses. I hope we can just choose to stay home or work from home or side hustle from home part-time.
If one good thing has come out of this, then it’s that I’ve realised I actually rather like being home all day and I’ll be staying here just like it was when we were in lockdown, only without the fear that I’m committing a crime by stopping to chat to a neighbour on my walk.
And one day we will laugh, and remember those strange days when a pandemic taught us that life’s too short to be spent doing things we don’t want to be doing and to think it was ‘normal’ to spend 40 hours a week away from our kids.
‘It’s not normal to spend 40 hours a week away from your kids’