I wrote this last term. It feels shameful, ungrateful… sacrilegious, even. Perhaps I’ll regret sharing this. But today - the second day of the third week since we finished a two month long stint of solo homeschooling - I felt an unfamiliar flutter. Excitement, that I would be collecting my children soon. Anticipation, of seeing their faces, hearing them shouting and squeaking over each other as they jostle to tell me about the tiny triumphs and tribulations of their day. I was flooded with what I can only describe as a sense of relief. We weren’t broken. I wasn’t broken. We were going to be ok.

Even with the many advantages we enjoyed - adequate technology and living space, good health, kids without additional needs who don’t mind learning too much, the relative flexibility of some of my work, enough sleep - combining my jobs with homeschooling was horribly challenging. I felt I had completely lost my sense of myself, because I was never alone - though, not having seen an adult other than my husband socially in a quarter of a year - I was always lonely. Even while on the loo I was assailed by demands to referee sibling battles, unanswerable questions (“Why is it a called a house?”) and unceasing demands for snacks. It was impossible to finish an email, a sentence, a thought.

I couldn’t leave the house alone before my husband came home, and by that point it was dark. So the walks we were being encouraged to take to keep us on a mental even keel involved forty-five minutes of negotiation and hectoring (why are my children so fundamentally opposed to wearing socks when the mere thought of being unslippered for a moment gives me the heebie jeebies?) followed by a snail’s pace trudge round the same walk, often with someone wailing throughout. Uplifting! Rejuvenating! A balm to the locked down soul!

The children were expected to do at least three hours of schooling a day, and at four and seven, couldn’t work independently. Work required at least six core hours each day. We were up to twelve hours before anyone had cleaned their teeth. (Did anyone clean their teeth?) On my in-house days I started work at 6am, never finished before 9pm, and scrambled and failed to get through lessons and presentations, meetings and meals between, doing constant battle with the maelstrom of toys and drawing and Lego (bloody OUCH!) that swirled in their wake and engulfed us if left unchecked. If I’d worked in-house four or five days a week, I couldn’t have coped. Trying to do everything at once, I was always exasperated, impatient and snappy. I lost my temper often. I shouted, I screamed - and then I cried because I felt so furiously guilty.

Last summer, at the tail-end of a previous five month stint with both children at home, I edited Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about motherhood. The poems helped me remember the tender madness of the newborn days, and the sticky, beaming toddlers my kids were relatively recently. They reminded me of the privilege and pleasure of parenting when it felt like I was a mass caterer, a hostage negotiator, a kitchen maid and a referee - as well as a terrible teacher and an exhausted employee - and not really a mother anymore. They reminded me that my children are funny and bonkers and magic and that I love spending time with them.

But not all my time. It feels selfish to admit that I cannot be ‘mother’ with every last scrap of my time, my life, my mind, my heart - but it’s true. This week, I delivered the children to school - they are so happy to be back, so buoyant now with the dramas and delights of their days - and returned to the tranquil house and relieved cats to work. I recorded online events, attended meetings, crafted pitches and press releases, wrote chapter openers for a new anthology and book reviews, drafted blog posts and newsletters, answered emails. I could hear myself think. I could hear myself. And when I realised I missed my children, I cried with gratitude.