Member-only story
My Teens Have Their Own Lockdown Food Budget
It’s saving our sanity and giving us some control back over our disrupted lives.
In the third week of March, the UK decided to close schools and colleges due to the coronavirus.
My teens are 17 and 15. Both their educational establishment's closed on the Friday of that week, at short notice.
My eldest son was then furloughed with us on 48-hour call up from the Armed Forces, my partner told to work from home and I was dipping in and out of agency work because my industry — working with school groups in the outdoors- shut down overnight.
Like much of the rest of the country, we were all stuck at home together with no definite end.
I’ve been a stay at home Mum and then a working Mum. I’d paid my dues juggling the bulk of the household jobs. I knew there was no way I wanted to go back to those days because there’s something that’s not often acknowledged about running a household — especially one with kids in it.
It takes an incredible amount of mental and emotional energy.
It’s not the physical labour of actually doing the stuff that needs doing. It was organising and managing it all that wore me down.
