Reflections on lockdown with the family

 As lockdown is slowly being eased here in England, life is slowly creeping back to normality, 3 of our children have returned to university, our youngest back to college and Master is spending more time in the offices at work rather than working from home, although home is most certainly calmer without the hustle and bustle of everyone being here I am missing it, albeit not all of it! 

This lockdown was smoother than the first one back last March, it had to be, Master made made it clear he would not stand for a repeat of that one, and for myself I didn't either, I was held accountable and punished which I'm not proud of and should have known better.

It was I believe adapting to lockdown and the restrictions that caused frustrations in us all for different reasons, although I'm not wanting to make excuses, Master does not like excuses but he dislikes disregard for his authority even more, so my slipping into habits he doesn't like wasn't going to go un-noticed for long, especially as he was home all the time.

It was a culmination of little things, making breakfast for the kids as and when they eventually got themselves up, usually long after I had made breakfast for Master and myself, doing their laundry, basically running around doing stuff for them, the final straw was when we was going to bed and I remembered that I had forgotten to wash and dry one of our sons uniform that he asked me if I could do earlier (he had gotten a temporary job in a supermarket).  

To say Master was not happy would be an understatement, and initially I was defensive, I'm their mum, I like caring for them, and I want to, and said that to Master, that night I was not given permission to sleep in the bed, but on the floor at the end, with the advice that perhaps I needed to think about why that was, and we would be having a discussion about it the next day, I was not happy and felt that I hadn't done anything wrong, nevertheless I did cry, not that it had any effect on Master.

Consequently, after said discussion, as does quite often happen, I'm left ashamed, when he explains why he is disappointed, as I begin to see how I have not considered his needs and expectations of me and therefore demonstrated a lack of respect for him.  

I felt even worse when he mentioned that he took some responsibility as clearly he had let the ball drop in managing me and that he intended on rectifying that with providing me with more structure and organisation, he does like organisation, something I am not so great at overall.

The kids all got a talking to, Master told them they was treating me with disrespect, they were not young children anymore, which was the issue, and the cause of my being held accountable, I was neglectful of Master in my service to him because my focus was on doing things for all the kids that I shouldn't have regardless of whether I wanted and liked to.

This post did not follow what I intended to talk about, the flow just went in a different direction, for now, I'm going to go and browse some blogs, although it's going to take some navigating being as it's all new to me.