With everyone up in arms over the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, our mothers have been hit the hardest. The loss of jobs, partners home either jobless or working from home, the children in a forced homeschool environment. Our sanity is about lost.
So how can mothers navigate in overdrive during the
coronavirus pandemic?
1. How are mothers working on overdrive during the CoronaVirus pandemic?
First, it’s important to understand living through a pandemic is a trauma. Parts of all of our brains have shut down in order to survive. We feel numb and removed from our emotions. Some of us are hypervigilant and anxious, some of us are depressed and inactive.
Moms are handicapped by their fears as they handle home life with children who are miserable, too, and who likely take it out on her.
She doesn’t have time to think her own thoughts. She’s their Health Director, worried about their future, their therapist, cook, entertainer, camp director and now TEACHER.
2. What can moms do with their children to bond while staying safe at home?
Bonding happens in big and small ways, when Mom and kids accept how each other is feeling in the moment.
Kids don’t need us to fix their feelings and we don’t need them to fix ours. Simply putting words to feelings is the way our brain relaxes in uncertainty.
Acceptance of how we feel, and self-soothing being our number one need, opens better ideas for how to cope.
Let them tell you what they think they need. Let them act on their ideas to learn what really is satisfying to them. Playing Minecraft for several hours can be educational.
3. Why is social media a blessing and a curse - Why does social media make us feel worse at times?
Social media is like reading a gossip magazine. It’s fun for a short time. Since it isn’t real life, no Mom shows herself losing it and screaming at her family. So slowly it can turn depressing when it isn't matching underlying fears and insecurities.
Moms report feeling worse when they see Mom’s enjoying this time, and adding cheerleading, “I got this!." Cheerleading is ineffective when hard feelings are on the surface.
4. How can we manage our stress and anxiety during this heightened time full of the unknown?
We need to put on our emotional masks, and not look at the suffering around the world. I strongly urge people to not watch the news. Nothing changes so rapidly we can’t go a day or two without catching up with a few headlines.
This pandemic is setting us up for Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome following recovery. The emotional recovery can take a long time to heal.
We may think watching everything gives us some control, but the only control we have is managing how we feel. We need whatever soothing we find to crawl through this experience.
5. How can mothers communicate with their children what is happening in the world or why mommy and daddy are working from home without scaring them?
Early in the day is the time to have any sort of discussion about what they’re feeling about what’s happening. Everyone is stronger to have a talk and listen to moments about how everyone is really doing. In small bits.
At Bedtime they may need to regress and feel afraid of being too far away from Mom. One client has given her six-year-old daughter a little bell to ring in a kind of call and response way. She knows she can ring it and Mom will answer back, until she falls asleep. And the bell is still there if she wakes again.
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