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Opinion Piece Friday 20th August 2021

Juggling life between motherhood, home schooling and work during the Covid-19 lockdown

I am a mother of 5 children, whose ages range between 4 and 8 years old. In March 2020, Uganda went into full lockdown due to the Covid-19 outbreak. This meant that schools, and other institutions, closed as a way of containing the spread of the virus. Children had to study at home for their safety, and parents had to stay at home too. All of this happened in a very short space of time, and as parents, we had to reorganise our lives to create conducive spaces for everyone in the household, and to ensure that we remained productive.

To help us manage, we came up with several ideas, including creating timetables for different daily activities for us to partake in, synchronised mealtimes which would run for about 30-60 minutes, plus we would ensure that the young ones had some snacks that would see them through the day. Additionally, we organised workstations to accommodate us, which were usually selected on a first come first served basis (a trick that would guarantee that everyone organised themselves quickly to ensure that they didn’t get the worst workstations for the day!).