All I want for Christmas is some peace from my kids…

I’m in our spare room, hiding from the children. My own children.

I can hear them having a riotous bath just one room away – with their dad’s supervision by the way, no need to phone social services – but I’ve no desire to join them. And unfortunately, this kind of sketchy maternal behaviour has become increasingly necessary since March.

The lockdown period has baked into both of my kids an anxious determination to have me in their eyeline at all times. It’s sweet, yes, and totally understandable, but also quite… exhausting.

Everyone has struggled to deal with the uncertainty and restrictions imposed on us over the last few months, but small children – or mine at least – have too much energy to be contained like this, and the surfeit courses through them hotly like lava. Lava that must, occasionally, do as lava does. When my volcano babies erupt at each other ­– which, when you’re stuck in the house together is all the time – the fallout is predictably loud, fraught and emotional. This means I spend the majority of my time anticipating collisions, diverting their courses, refereeing, mediating, distracting, or doling out consequences. Don’t I sound like such a fun mum?

I dig deep, so very deep, to not lose my shit with them. To model the calm responses I know they need to see in these situations. But good lord is it tiring – and not always a success.

With their dad’s job having pretty inflexible hours, I do the majority of childcare in our family, so when my husband can get home from work early enough, he usually takes care of bath and bed to give me some time for myself. This is always appreciated, and during the summer I’d be heading out the door with the beach in my sights the minute that baton was passed. But it’s winter now, and the idea of getting some fresh air is less appealing on dank, windy evenings.

The other night, I went for a walk that took me into one of the more affluent areas of our town, full of huge houses set far back from the road, peeking seductively from behind trees and long driveways. The sun had gone down, so most of them were lit up, flaunting their double height lounges and gleaming kitchen-diners. As a card-carrying house perv, I was loving being able to openly ogle their plush interiors under the cover of darkness, until I saw a man at his (giant bay) window look at me with cold suspicion before swiftly shutting his curtains. I realised then how I must have seemed: Clad all in black and with my hood up to protect me from the rain, I appeared to be casing the neighbourhood for burglary rather than innocently taking the air and getting off on my proximity to bespoke cabinetry.

So, tonight I thought I’d spare myself the cold toes and embarrassment and instead… do what exactly? The cafes and pubs where I could meet a friend in the warm or read a book have been closed, gym classes are off, and even late-night shopping has lost its dim allure, what with masks and the two-metre rule serving as constant reminders that we’re living through something too frightening to be soothed by the purchase of a new cardigan. That’s why, for lack of options, I am staying put and hiding out, the kids oblivious to the fact that I’m still in the house.

Being so near to them while having no responsibility for their care is a bittersweet experience. On the one hand, if (when) it all kicks off about the end of TV time or who gets to choose the bedtime story, I can just sit back and let the muffled screeching wash over me from my haven, safe in the knowledge that for once, today, I am not charged with putting on my stern voice and shutting it all down. On the other hand, bath and bedtime is often when my kids hit peak adorable: clementine-scented, sleepy and looking for cuddles as 13 hours of solid radgery draws to a close. But you can’t have it both ways, and to have any hope of matching their combined energy tomorrow (and the next day, and the next) I have to occasionally excuse myself from the full breakfast-to-bed stint and recharge my own battery.

The problem is how to enjoy this covert freedom. I feel the pressure of making the time count in some way, but how?

Doing the online shop doesn’t feel like the right vibe, but it does need doing and if I forget to update the basket again tonight I’ll end up with four bottles of Crémant and a bag of elderly cat food like last week. I could improve myself somehow – I hear that’s what we’re all supposed to be doing while normal life is on pause – but what none of those Guardian wellness articles or Instagram influencers acknowledge is how completely knackering it is just to carry on as normal.

This performance – to our kids, our employers, ourselves – of things being ‘fine, thanks!’, pretending that we aren’t all lost in a vast, bewildering fog, takes a significant amount of daily energy. Often, by the time I’ve eaten dinner, all I am good for is judgily narrating I’m a Celeb from a prone position. And the insistence from certain quarters that I – we – should be capable of more than this as the world burns is unhelpful at best, damaging at worst. If you can master Japanese or learn to knit during this binfire, good for you. But please, I beg you, couldn’t you just let everyone else take the all-encompassing insanity at their own pace?

Which neatly circles back to me and the spare room. This bedroom – which in the Before Times hosted friends or family most weekends – has gone unused for so long that our kids have forgotten it exists. I worry that they’re forgetting not just the room but why it exists and who has stayed in it: our pals, and even their farthest flung grandparents who, for the past year, have existed to them only on Zoom as slightly unwelcome interruptions to the CBeebies schedule.

But their amnesia about this room does mean that I’m able to step in here and essentially disappear, through the wardrobe and into Narnia. In Narnia, no one asks me for a snack as they eat a snack I’ve just given to them. In Narnia, there are no book debates. In Narnia, the only arse I have to wipe is my own. It is, truly, a wonderland.

And while doing some yoga or starting that online illustration course occasionally suggest themselves as ways to revive or better myself, for now I’m going to stick on a podcast, browse extortionate serums I’ll never buy, and hide from my children.