NEWS

Kate’s Coronavirus lockdown blog: Moving in with family and getting used to their ways of doing things

Hello my name is Kate Brackley and I am writing this blog to explain what it feels like to be in a lockdown as part of the Coronavirus that has spread from China to all around the world dominating all over the news channels on your television screens.

This will be a series of blogs on different areas that myself and other people are currently going through and what it feels like coping / not coping in this difficult period.

From my personal experience that I had no choice to move into the family home again, to me it was a range of mixed emotions and a feeling of excitement too. Being with family again is for me the best as I know that I can have a lot of fun with them and be able to do more with them in replacement to my many groups that have stopped. I can enjoy them even more being with family and share them together this makes me happy and to be able to have a better relationship with my parents has made it even better for me.

The hardest thing for me when I did move back into the family home is that I have a support worker that supports me when I was living in my own flat, although I have moved in the family house I am still keeping in touch with my support worker every other day through my IPad and still have plenty of things to catch up on.

The biggest challenge that I felt was getting back to certain rules and for me living on my own in my own flat to the transition back to my family home that took some doing. I am now coping fine and it’s nice to have some things that I can be independent in doing and some things where I just need some help.

I like to share the things that I have been helping my family with – I have been helping with the hoovering, helping with the cooking, unloading the dishwasher every morning, helping with feeding the dog in the evening for his tea. I have been helping in cleaning the family car inside and out, helping potting plants and watering them too. We have also been playing scrabble too on some nights.

I think that from my experience and being aware of other people with learning disabilities that don’t have family to move in would be much harder as people with learning disabilities may not cope at all and be very much reliant in doing things for themselves a lot more and also coping with things like food shopping and for some people can cause high levels of stress. Only going to the supermarket once a week and queuing and trying to keep to the 2 metre space away from people is very difficult in an actual main supermarket. I am properly fortunate to be able to have family that I can move in with and for me it is worrying for those people who do not have anyone to move in with just to get by.

I think the real challenge for some people would be the lack of understanding why they need to go back to the family home during this difficult time as this could have major problems following the government advice. Family support is essential as they want to protect their children as safely as possible like what my mum is doing with me as they have the best interests at heart and that we need to respect that and abide what they mean and to listen to them.

By reading this I would like to think that people have an idea of how you sacrifice your independence going back to the family home from being independent to being with family during this difficult time and that we do keep ourselves and family members as safe as possible.