I don't want to live “waiting” anymore. What political crises look like in the everyday life of parents

I'm tired of living with the feeling that my life is “on hold”. I'm tired of hoping, and fighting, and reading newspaper headlines with my soul in my mouth. For several years, I have felt every “earthquake” on the political scene directly in my family's life. And I'm not just talking about financial aspects, but also about insecurity, anxiety, frustrations.

We haven't made plans for a while now. We say “see you later” more and more. “When do we go on vacation?”, “When do we change the furniture in the bedroom?”, “When do we buy I-don't-know-what?”. We'll see! I began to answer my child half-heartedly, avoiding the truth. And I am still haunted by this endless string of deferred promises. Every time it seems that we sit down, that we can breathe and say “done, now we build”, there is another fracture, a war, a crisis. And we start over. I feel the same way today.

I don't want to do politics. I am not good at counting votes and calculating scenarios after censure motions. I just want to say how the crisis feels here, in my kitchen, in our plans, in my child's life. I'm tired of living life on pause. I'm tired of sitting on the sidelines and feeling like I can't change anything.

Life on hold is not a parenting strategy

We no longer buy the house “this year for sure” (as we used to say a year ago), because “maybe it's not the time”. We no longer book the holiday ahead of time, so that it will be cheaper and quieter, because “we'll see how we get on”. I no longer say “next year will be better”, because I no longer have that conviction behind the words. I say, more and more often, “see you later”.

For me, as an adult, “we'll see” is a form of caution, an adaptation. For my child, it's confusion. It's insecurity. It is the feeling that nothing is stable, that nothing is certain and that even the parents do not know exactly where they are going. He doesn't ask me about the economic or political crisis, he doesn't know what inflation is, nor what our budget looks like in Excel.

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