It’s the stubborn look that washes over my boys’ faces when I suggest they write a letter to their granny that triggers my rage.

I cannot stand sulky kids at the best of times.

But I especially cannot bear sulky kids when they are luckier than virtually any child on this pandemic-ridden planet and I just want them to get out a pen and tell their grandmother, who is shielding in a house on her own, what it is they are doing with their days. 

But yes, it is - as my nine- and 11-year-old say in more colourful tones - a rubbish idea.

As a child in the 1970s, I used to like writing letters, poems, diaries and stories. But I didn’t have Roblox or Fifa Mobile, and I wasn’t in the middle of a game with my best friend bizarrely called “Adopt Me”, which is now played daily via FaceTime.

Plus, I wasn’t enduring weeks on end with only my mum and dad for real-life company. But week something-or-other into lockdown and I am out of any other ideas to keep us occupied.

So I continue, stupidly, to insist on the letter-writing activity. My 11-year-old grudgingly scratches two words - “Made waffles” - across the top of his piece of paper, then silently retreats into doodling.

I barely stop myself from hissing at him to wipe the look off his face. Despite my increasingly manic “encouragement” to my nine-year-old to tell his isolating grandmother fun stuff “to cheer her up”, he drops his pen on the floor and glances up at me with tears welling in his wide, perfect eyes.

“You say it’s fun but this isn’t what kids think is fun, Mummy,” he says.

And so I hate myself all over again. Why can’t I get this right?

Coronavirus: ‘I am shockingly bad at teaching my own children’

I now know for certain what I suspected before.

Despite the fact that I have lots of experience in training adults and love the stimulation of designing courses and the intellectual challenge of delivering workshop sessions, I am shockingly bad at teaching my own children.

I also notice that their dad is very much better at it than me, which I find both fantastic and galling.

They seem to skip down the road with him to find “signs of spring”; in another session he teaches them how to distinguish different types of birdsong. Who are these children?

Two sessions baking cupcakes with me is probably the limit of what can count as maths, particularly when the nine-year-old is meant to be learning fractions.

But I hated fractions when I was his age and still do, so I don’t want to have to learn how to do them, let alone how to teach them. Is that wrong?

I think back to what everyone said when schools closed down - that “parents will really value teachers now” - and that’s certainly true.

But while teachers are undoubtedly great, they are doing a job they want to do, that they trained for, are experienced at, and, crucially, have the skills to succeed at.

They can teach 30 children because they have learned how to do it.

I don’t have the ability or, perhaps more crucially, the desire to teach even two children. Put even more bluntly, I want to spend a lot less time with my kids than lockdown demands. I’ve got used to my job being something I’m good at.

I want to do more of that work that I love, and not be interrupted “for a cuddle” every time I sit down at my computer for the three hours I supposedly have each morning to do a job that is usually full-time, and takes a level of concentration and energy that I’m struggling with, thanks to “pandemic anxiety”.

Then in the afternoons when my partner and I swap over and I’m meant to be teaching the boys, I feel the urge to be doing almost anything else - reading a book on my own, going for a walk on my own, watching telly on my own.

The honest truth

But it’s really distasteful to admit that, right? Because people are suffering terrible isolation in lockdown and others, horrifically, are dying alone.

This is the strange reality of how different people in different circumstances will experience this pandemic; some will suffer terribly, and others, like me, for as long as we are lucky, barely suffer at all, yet struggle with our inability to adapt cheerfully to pressures we guiltily sense we shouldn’t really notice, let alone rail against. 

Sometimes, I find I just want to lie in bed and go to sleep. I want not to have to think up whizzy learning activities. And I want having to be a teacher to be over.

But, like I tell my kids, you can’t always get what you want. Like me wishing they’d write a letter to their granny.

Louise Tickle is a freelance journalist