Not checking WhatsApp

It’s covid. 2020. Home schooling is in full flow. Susan’s work is deemed essential. She continues to travel to work as normal (as normal as normal can be). I’m the working-from-home person, the home schooling person, the single parent person, the home cooking person. My work is insanely busy (so busy in fact, I would later reach a point where I couldn’t cope and changed job. I could still be working at 11:00pm most nights but that’s another story). I’m the exhausted person. Susan is not helping at all. She’s gone at 6am in the morning and doesn’t arrive home until after 8pm every day ( #entitlement ) . Something I’m partially grateful for, there’s help and then there’s torture caused by her “helping”. I’m enjoying the time with my daughter.

What? you ask, nope, she’s not working those hours, she walks the park in the morning before work and the same again in the evening ( #entitlement ) . I’m not sure where the rest of the evening time goes, perhaps she is actually having an affair like she claims during most devaluing sessions these strange days.

There’s a school class WhatsApp group. One day, an exasperated parent exclaims something about how difficult it is and how the school could do specific item A and specific item B to help the plight of the home schooling parents. Some comments flooded in, then, radio silence for about a month on the group bar the odd request for clarification on homework until…

Susan replying a month later ->

“I’m finding it so difficult to juggle the homeschooling and work at the same time, just wondering how others are finding it?” (or something to that general effect). Susan on the WhatsApp ( #victim-playing #fake-empathy #manipulation ) .

WTFF? Like, where did this come from?

I’ll never know for sure if she did it out of delusional magical thinking or if she did it to help maintain her facade in case anybody would think she wasn’t participating in the home schooling ( #gaslighting #manipulation ) .

She got a couple of votes of sympathy ( #supply ) .

I cannot express the magnitude of just how bonkers that actually was. It was the equivalent of a parent doing absolutely no parenting whatsoever, zero, then complaining about all the parenting she had to do. Oh wait, that’s exactly what it was ( #victim-playing #gaslighting ) .