More than two years have passed since the outbreak of the epidemic in early 2020, and probably no one could have predicted that such a life would last so long.
Under the epidemic, different cities have been pressed the pause button. But cities are pressed the pause button, and our lives can't.
No matter how much our lives have been affected and changed, or to continue, the daily life of raising a baby will still be entangled, swaying, confused, happy... cram.
The article shared today comes from the story of a mother who was forced to live separately from her husband due to the epidemic and lived alone with two boys for more than two years.
Her heart went from the beginning to look forward to the end of the epidemic a little earlier, life back on track, to the recurrence of the epidemic, and the news of the free customs clearance in Shenzhen and Hong Kong that she saw came out again and again...
During these more than 700 days, what difficulties did the family's life experience? Mother alone with two babies, is there a moment when you can't help it or even collapse? How do dads and kids bond when they're apart?
Let's listen to what Mother Tiger has to say.
Family Profile:
Tiger Mom: Double Master of Arts, IBO International Baccalaureate Organization registered teacher, former university teacher, currently living in Hong Kong, engaged in the insurance industry;
Tiger Dad: General manager of a science and education company in Shenzhen;
Eldest son: Tiger Boy, 11 years old, a 6th grade primary school student, has successfully passed the interview of a secondary school in Hong Kong and is about to become a secondary school student;
Second son: Xiao Junbao, 7 years old, a 1st grade student, still in the age of ignorance, likes his brother and regards his brother as an example.
I'm Tiger Mom. The epidemic has repeatedly affected the lives of many people, and my small family is no exception.
Because of the pandemic, I lived alone in Hong Kong with two children for two years. Without any foreign aid, and living with the two divine beasts day and night, what was the situation of my more than 700 days? When someone hears about a man with two boys, what comes to mind? Chicken flying dog jumping, chicken feathers on the ground?
My tiger mother is not the kind of "tiger mother" who practices "high-pressure parenting", because my eldest son belongs to the tiger, called tiger boy. And on the contrary, not only am I not a "chicken baby", in order to let the children have more choices in the future, my husband and I moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong through our own efforts and struggles.
My husband needs a Hong Kong-Shenzhen cross-border commute, so we live in the northern district of Hong Kong, which is closer to Shenzhen, mr. cross-border commuting every day, commuting time is about 1 hour, and it is acceptable.
Before the epidemic, our life is no different from that of ordinary office workers, generally get up at 7 o'clock, after the family eats breakfast, Mr. about 7:50 out of the house, by the way to send my brother to school, the school is close to home, 5 minutes walk to arrive, and then he goes to Shenzhen to work. My brother's kindergarten class at 9 o'clock, so the task of sending him was entrusted to me, and I went to the company after sending my brother. As with other families with two babies, the task is clearly divided.
After a busy day, our family also returned home one after another, the whole family had dinner together, after eating or watching a movie or playing games together, or I cleaned up at home, and my husband took the children downstairs to play... Although he wants to work in Shenzhen and experience the "twin city life", the time every night is also the warmest and most down-to-earth companion for the family every day.
Until the arrival of the epidemic...
▲ Father and son three
When the epidemic first broke out, I originally wanted to invite my parents to come to Hong Kong to support me with my baby, but they were Hubei nationals, and for policy reasons, they could not come to Hong Kong. My first layer of support was cut off.
We hurried to the foreign domestic help agency to ask the Filipino maid, the same is the policy impact, Hong Kong stopped all foreigners from entering, the Filipino maid could not arrive in Hong Kong on time, and the second layer of support was also frustrated.
At this time, it is necessary for the husband to make a choice, either to quit his job and stay in Hong Kong; or to go to Shenzhen and leave me and my two children in Hong Kong. These two choices are difficult for him and me. After weighing the struggles, I decided to let him go to Shenzhen and take on the responsibility of taking the baby alone.
On the day that the gentleman left for Shenzhen, we blew candles and ate cake together, which was a small practice ceremony. However, at that time, we could not imagine that two years later, we are still separated from each other.
▲ In February 2020, before Dad left Hong Kong for Shenzhen
My decision at that time was really not a hot-headed, reckless decision, but a rational analysis and judgment.
First of all, I have more confidence in the baby, the two children are brought up by my own hands, and our parent-child relationship is very well established. Before the epidemic, I often took them alone to travel far away;
Secondly, the brothers are relatively skinny children, healthy and not picky eaters, and I have enough confidence to take them well.
But this time the solitary baby is a long-term battle, unlike a short trip, there is also pressure. But pressure is also motivation, and the resilience in my bones is completely stimulated. Isn't it just two babies? I also have my management tricks:
Step 1:
Start by setting up a "team"
Manage the baby with a team management method
Inspiration from Survival in the Wild: Whenever you go to a new place, the first thing to do is to find a commanding height, look around to see what resources are available, and then decide which direction to go.
I look around, what resources are available? Two boys, one 9 years old and one 5 years old. That's all I have to do. But there are also breakthroughs - my brother Tiger Boy is my first resource, he began to learn to cook at the age of 7, and he has strong self-care ability, so he can become my right-hand man.
I had enough confidence in my brother that when he was seven years old, I started to let him learn to cook, not to ask him to help me much, but to think that this was a basic ability that anyone should know, and I told him that "children who can cook will not go anywhere."
So he can now do simple rice by himself: omelette, boiled noodles, boiled dumplings and wontons, etc., and he also learned to make bubble tea and ginger milk on the Internet.
▲ In the past two years, if I get up late in the morning, Tiger Boy will make breakfast for the three of us
On the first day with the baby, I had our first family meeting. The purpose of a family meeting is twofold:
First, the sense of ceremony, we are a team, is a community of interests, to face the next difficulties together;
Second, the sense of ownership, so that children are more likely to cooperate with the tasks behind.
We focused on the allocation of housework and the arrangement of learning.
Make plans, judge the difficulties that may be encountered and propose solutions, such as during the epidemic, going out to eat is relatively dangerous, cooking at home will be more, and at the same time, washing dishes more often. If every meal was my wash, it would definitely be irritable. I needed my brother to share the work with me, and my brother chose to wash the breakfast dishes. The progress was very smooth in the back, and the brother consciously washed the dishes without complaint.
▲ The minutes of the first family meeting were pasted on the refrigerator
Step 2:
Learn time management to do more with less
The younger brother is relatively young and belongs to the "sheep herding state". So during the epidemic, it was mainly the brother's learning tasks that required better time management. To make my brother more efficient, I taught him the classic four-quadrant chart of time management.
▲Four-quadrant chart for time management
I spent half an hour explaining the diagram to him, and then combined it with some examples from our previous lives. It gave him a certain understanding of the time that management allocates himself. According to what I said, he made a weekly study plan himself. Not particularly meticulous, but it was clear that he was able to identify his main weekly study tasks.
Then there is the step-by-step implementation, and every working day after that, I sit at the table to work, and my brother sits across from me to study, which can not only ensure time, but also play a role in supervising.
The "shepherd" brother likes to draw, and basically draws about twenty pictures a day. He also likes to read, build Lego or magnetic films, so when I work and my brother is studying, my brother can basically enjoy himself and do his own things quietly.
Step 3:
An important prerequisite for the completion of the safeguard plan -
Overcome procrastination
It is easy to make a plan, and ensuring the implementation of the plan is the time to test the parent-child relationship. I have a little method that I call "fighting monsters with the whole family."
What is a monster? The monster is procrastination. People are inert, adults have them, not to mention children. In front of my children, I never hid my weaknesses, and I told them my procrastination and the fact that I had to catch papers all night in the library because of procrastination. When they come up with the idea of procrastination, they don't feel guilty and know that it's normal.
How to overcome procrastination? I set up a team reward mechanism, at the end of each month, if everyone can complete their plan, then we can get 800 bonuses, 200 per person, and 200 is team activity funds.
This reward requires everyone to complete the plan. In this way, the three of us become a community of interests, supervising each other. Sometimes when I was working and playing with my phone, my brother would tell me:
Mom, you have to do something important first, or we won't get the bonus.
My brother once did not complete the task, the words he planned to memorize were not finished, at the beginning, he was crazy to rush to work, but the more he memorized, the more irritable he became, the brother wanted to give up:
Forget Mom, I don't want this reward, I'm too tired.
I didn't say anything, and when he was emotionally stable, I showed him a video of "Never Give Up" and told him:
Now you still have a whole day, do you want to try to challenge your limits, if the challenge is successful, we will have 800 yuan bonus.
Otherwise, my brother would be disappointed, he had completed his plan, and he wanted to buy toys.
He didn't answer me, ran to bed and lay down, not knowing what kind of fierce thought struggle he had in his head, and finally he decided to memorize the words. He copied words for 5 hours in a row that day, and finally completed the plan for the month at 5:30 p.m. When he was done, he was refreshed. I think it will be an unforgettable experience for him, not only to receive a prize, but also to achieve a great sense of accomplishment after completing his predetermined goals.
When the child decides to give up, reprimand him, blame him, make him feel guilty, let him take responsibility for the failure of the team, not only can not motivate the child to complete the plan, but also may cause the child to become uncooperative. It is better to help him taste the joy of success, and this joy will become the motivation for the next time.
After we received our individual and team bonuses, he asked me, "Do we still have a family monster fight next month?" He can't wait to start next month's study program.
It's true that the methods I prepared and used earlier made me confident, but it's also true that I spent far more time alone with my baby than expected. At first, I thought that the epidemic would end at most on May Day, when I also gave an educational lecture - "71 Days alone with a baby", thinking that this was the limit. Looking back now, it's like telling a joke. If someone had told me at the time that number was multiplied by 10, my mindset would have collapsed.
In two years, the most I wanted my husband to be around was when I went through an operation alone.
Loneliness is graded, and it is said that the highest level is the tenth level – a person who has surgery. I tried it once during the lockdown:
Go to the surgery alone and sign the risk notice yourself.
I told my family that it was a minor surgery, but it was actually a major surgery, general anesthesia, and the scalpel was about 8 centimeters. Fortunately, I only needed to stay one night to be discharged, but at that moment I would still think that if my husband was here, he would definitely come to accompany me. Before the operation, I joked with my husband video: "Can't accompany me to the operation, I can talk to you about it for the rest of my life"...
But life is like this, as if to deliberately test a person's resilience. I was like a mountaineer, walking with my head down, looking back and seeing that I had walked so far.
With two children alone, the hardest part is emotional management. When there are two adults in the family, one is angry, and the other person can stand up for proper buffering. When you are alone, there is no room for buffering. On the 28th day of carrying the baby alone, I got angry for the first time.
Because of something very small, I suddenly got emotional, and I said, "I'm not cooking anymore, I don't have food tonight."
The younger brother did not understand and continued to play with himself. My brother didn't talk back to me, he went to his room for 5 minutes, and then went into the kitchen to make dinner. After a while, my brother asked me how to cook rice, and I ignored him, so he searched the Internet himself.
I went to my room to take a nap, and my confused brother told me to get up and eat, and I said let's eat first. When I woke up, I saw my brother and my brother stargazing with binoculars, and there was a prepared dinner on the table, steamed eels, and fried vegetables. The younger brother said, "Mom, my brother's cooking is delicious." I took a bite and put a lot of vinegar in the greens. The brother said sheepishly, "There's too much water, and the rice is a little thin."
Eating the meals cooked by children, I feel that I am quite naïve, and my emotional control ability is not as good as that of children.
In fact, I am a person with strong emotional control ability, and compared to my son, I am not good enough.
When I say I don't cook, I'm actually a form of intimidation, a form of condescending authoritarianism;
He wouldn't cook rice to ask me, and I ignored him, in fact, cold violence.
In the process, he was not distracted by my emotions, but tried to find a solution on his own.
I also reflected on why I was angry, I was too sleepy that day, sleep deprived, and prone to anger. In the first month of being alone with my baby, I was still very demanding of my work, often working until the early hours of the morning. After realizing this problem, I consciously reduced my workload and allowed myself to have more energy to spend with my children.
I am often asked how to deal with conflicts between children with two boys alone, and will they fight?
For the handling of the relationship between children, I prepared for the birth of Erbao and read some children's psychology books, including "Child Challenge" published by the mother of the children's book.
There is a saying that is a big taboo for families with many children:
You are the boss and should let the younger brother/sister go.
This sentence has never appeared in our family, and the boss is not obliged to let the small one.
Now that my brother is in the sixth grade and my younger brother is in the first grade, their relationship can be described as "brotherhood and brotherhood", which is also a point that my friends envy my family.
The older brother is a warm man and usually takes good care of his younger brother;
The younger brother admired his brother for knowing a lot of scientific knowledge and took his brother as an example.
The older brother fell in love with bird watching, the younger brother followed the older brother and knew many kinds of birds;
The older brother shoots the birds, the younger brother draws the birds, and the brothers cooperate seamlessly.
▲ The picture of the bird taken by the older brother and the picture of the bird drawn by the younger brother
Boys, they have to do a lot of outdoor activities, so that they have more contact with nature and have a broader mind. On weekends, we use the mountains and seas as a classroom to carry out a wealth of outdoor activities.
Hong Kong has twenty-four country parks and many islands, and the warm weather attracts a large number of migratory birds to spend the winter. Almost every week, the children go bird watching, adventure, hiking, and have fun.
Rather than worrying about when to clear customs, we'd be more happy to look into where to go bird watching this weekend.
▲ My brother photographed the birds, and I followed my brother to know the names of many birds that I didn't know before
After two years of sealing, Mr. is also doing his best to accompany the children. For the sake of family reunion, he has been quarantined five times, and he has spent the winter and summer vacations and the Spring Festival with us in the past two years.
Even in the days of separation, the bond between us has not been broken. For example, Saturday is our family movie day, he will free up time, he is in Shenzhen, we are in Hong Kong, every Saturday night with us to watch the same movie, to cultivate a tacit understanding within the family.
▲ In the past two years, the long shadow list has strung together the emotions of our family
Although he is in Shenzhen, he has always been worried about the children in his heart, and will send a batch of books and STEM education materials to the children every two weeks. Both kids love programming, which is a topic they and dad share. Under the remote tutoring of his father, his brother passed the C programming level 2 exam, also won some programming competition awards, and has been a member of the school's STEM team.
At the time of writing, I have just received a large package from my husband on a regular basis—books for the children, and food for me, which I am probably a foodie who is not learned in his eyes.
And no matter when, Mr. in my eyes is the most solid backing that has always been there. Even if separated temporarily, the love of the family is tightly held together.
Under the epidemic, there are ordinary ordinary people's stories playing out every day, each of us is under the huge wheel of the epidemic, or adapting or struggling, we don't know when the epidemic will end, the epidemic is over, the world after the epidemic, will it return to the past? I don't know.
During the Spring Festival, our colleagues in the editorial department experienced isolation as time and space companions on the second day of the Chinese New Year, and when we described the mood and bits she experienced in the meeting, she couldn't help but collapse and cry, and we also cried tears across the screen;
This past week, our colleagues in Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Beijing are also experiencing different degrees of isolation;
And my baby's dad was also trapped in Tianjin because of the health treasure pop-up window, one night when my son and I were lying on his cot with his father, my son suddenly put my mobile phone between the two of us and said, "So we are lying on the pillow together."
Not to mention the people who are stranded on their way home, the health care workers who are rushing to support the frontline and can't get home...
Under the epidemic, you and I have our own difficulties.
Finally, I would like to end with a passage from Tiger Mother:
I read an article before that during the Great Depression in the United States, families supported each other by each other's love and survived that difficult day.
I think that in a few years, my children and I will remember these days of supporting each other, and I hope that when they remember their mother, the mood will be clear and happy.
In their future days, they will definitely encounter sudden changes in their lives, and I hope that I will give them a demonstration of resilience.