By Guest writer, Nana
“I was diagnosed and admitted because of pressure and diabetes for a week”. It is strange, I had no clues that I had pressure or diabetes; Says 38year old Hajjat.
She then narrates how it all started, her 17year old daughter was discovered pregnant and later developed early pregnancy complications that resulted in her hospitalization for about a month. This was followed by another daughter who had attempted an abortion mid this year and ended up undergoing an operation.
Hajjat wails in agony, casting doubt on her abilities as a mother and feeling unworthy.
Hajjat is not alone. On social media and in confides of friends and colleagues, it’s been hard to miss noticing how the usual stresses and strains of parenting have been intensified by the pandemic. Parents write about the difficulties of homeschooling while trying to work. There has been also the delicate task of managing children’s anxieties throughout the pandemic, and coping with any financial pressures brought about by such a turbulent time.
“I’m tired of how blurred the lines are between home and work,” Nancy tells me as her three children repeatedly scream in the background. Nancy lives in one of Kampala’s upscale neighborhoods with her husband, a 13year-old boy, daughters 11(eleven) and (07)seven. She is a civil servant but says she is feeling so burned out by childcare that she’s considering quitting her job completely. She isn’t sleeping properly, her back and hips ache from sitting at a desk all day and her constant to-do list makes life feel chaotic. This has been worsened by the lockdown, stay-at-home children, amongst of which are extended family teenagers from her Husband’s side. “Quitting my job feels like a big deal. I feel guilty as if I’m letting the sisterhood down – but this situation is untenable,” she says.
With all of this going on, it’s no wonder the kind of constant stress usually associated with overly demanding, high-pressure careers have suddenly blossomed over the past two years.
Most weekend mornings, I’m forced out of bed by a child’s scream – either a demand for food or a shriek of pain after a fight with a sibling. Like the walking dead, I drag myself out of bed; says Felista a consultant in one of the popular audit firms in Kampala. As a working mother of three small boys, I am perpetually exhausted and feel as if I am stuck on a pendulum that swings between overwhelming love and maternal rage.
“I think I have parental burnout,” says Marylyn a Congolese national married in Uganda. I said to my husband. “Do you have it, too?” He looked at me as if I’m mad. “Of course!” he said. Marylyn continues; “It’s been worse with us who have teenagers. You are only sure they are safe when you see them. At work you don’t settle, I tried monitoring on the phone of their whereabouts but they would evade my calls as well. Life became more complicated when our daughter 17, joined a youth group and they were choreographing dances of western music. My worry was that she may end up a karaoke girl. I aged in one day, eventually, I saw my real age right in the mirror. I developed instant grey hair all over my head……..”
A poll carried out by Savanta.Com Resources earlier this year found that 45% of parents globally feel burned out, while a study by oxford university found levels of stress, anxiety, and depression rose in parents and caretakers during the pandemic lockdowns.
35-year-old Mukaneeza from Mubende lives with her husband and their four children, who are 14, nine, eight and one. The youngest was born during lockdown just as hospital services were congested and overrun by fear of the pandemic, meaning Mukaneeza had to go through 24-hour labor alone before being sent home with a newborn. Usually, her family would come to her aid, looking after her for 40 days after the birth; a tradition in many African cultures. “I was looking forward to having my mum help, and do the cooking, but because of lockdown that didn’t happen,” she says.
Mukaneeza narrates, that she had to go and work three days after labor. My husband is a teacher, schools had closed and my business was the sole bread earner for everyone at home. A year and a half on, she feels more than exhausted. “I feel as if I am a mother through muscle memory. I used to be incredibly calm, but I’m now short-tempered, I swear a lot in my head, I feel perpetually bitter and the mental load is becoming unbearable.”
In these fiery tales, I met Gideon 47, a single father of two from Nakulabye, who says that he has learned the hard way. “It started when I got worried about the future of my furniture business when my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer,” he says. “I have not had work for a while over lockdown, my kind of business is school furniture mostly. I had to immediately shift my mind to other sources of income because I needed money to take care of my father, and children. Thank God my sister offered to nurse our dad as I concentrated on looking for money as a taxi conductor, casual building site laborer, etc.
“Men often deal with parental stress by overworking, feeling they need to provide for their family. I threw myself into it and worked continuously. Monday to Friday was one shift, and then the weekends and evenings just felt like another. Managing crying children before work isn’t easy, and when you finish work, and you’re back to it again. I started to become quite irritable. I’m very optimistic, usually, but I felt like a horrible bag of negative emotions. I don’t think I was depressed. I was tired and grumpy and lost hope. I tried self-counseling but it didn’t help, and it felt like a steep mountain to climb.”
Many people are in similar situations. In the last few months, I made a call to one of my teammates at the workplace, we have been together “forging life in Kampala” as we popularly call it. This comrade has been fun, creative, result-oriented before the lockdown, but when I spoke to him again, his personality has been greyed and deadened. He just seemed to have less hope and less personal drive for productivity.
Personally, as the author, I have had to put myself under a lot of pressure to be seen as equally relevant to my workplace and male peers, so I probably shield work from a lot of the pressures that I have in my life because I want to demonstrate I can do it all. The mental load of things I have to do, from buying sink unblocker, to securing the young ones up from the claws of the merciless world, coming up with projects such as skills apprenticeship in tailoring, business, cookery, and bakery, is always in my head. It can leave me absent-minded for sure. I have practically lent my whole self out to the navy of youths under my care, loaned them my patience, focus, dream, inspiration, go-getter personality, determination, and resolve of never falling by the wayside in a generation.
Besides, after loaning all that I had on me, my workplace needed my whole presence and for sure I borrowed from the infinite powers of the universe to just keep afloat.
Seeing 2022 in just a few days to come, is not much excitement as the very first days of the year are back to school. This has equally gotten a greater section of the population into anxiety. The children are anxious about what school shall be like, much as the teachers are, to the total madness of those that pay the bill.
These and many more are the fiery tales of parenting in a lockdown prototype.
Merry Christmas
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