There are many, many key workers working their backsides off right now. Doctors and nurses staffing hospitals, caring for patients and vaccinating the vulnerable. Shopworkers stacking shelves, keeping our essentials stocked and serving the public as we patiently queue to buy yet more loo roll. Journalists breaking the news, teachers educating a generation, care workers tending to young and old, train drivers, waste disposal teams, the police force – the list is actually much longer than you think.

And for any or all of those workers, schools remain open. Our children can be dropped off and picked up in the new normal way (socially-distanced and fully masked up, as we have been since term began in September). It’s a service a lot of those workers couldn’t do without and it’s a truly brilliant thing that the children whose parents need to be physically at work in this weird and stressful time, can continue some sort of vague normality.

But sending your child into school – when the infection rate is scarily high and kids are now thought to be spreading it far and wide, which wasn’t really happening back in the springtime – can cause as much anxiety as trying to work out how on earth to juggle homeschooling and working from home.

If you’re a key worker, you might just empathise with some of these emotions…

Relief

Just the mere thought of attempting to work from home, juggle shifts and homeschool the kids brings the best of us out in a rash. So, when you first discover you’re classified as a key worker and your children can go to school, more or less as normal – though often without actual lessons, proper break times and wraparound care – the sense of relief is unreal. It makes your heart rate slow down even thinking about it.

Panic

It’s so great that your child can attend school, but the virus is rampant. And they’re going to be shut inside classrooms with other children, all of whom are the offspring of key worker parents. Parents going into hospital wards, serving the general public, and surely therefore much more likely to have Covid, right?

Despair

Should you send them in? Should you apply for furlough? Should you speak to your boss to see if they might actually help you in this desperate situation? There is no right or wrong here, and all the thoughts whizzing around your brain might actually drive you insane if you tune into them. Stop. And breathe.

Focus

Often, the bottom line is: there’s no other choice. You’re needed at work. Or you can’t afford to take time off, buy additional holiday, go on furlough or drop down to part-time. So there really is no choice. Once you get your head around that, life can feel simpler. You just need to block out the noise.

Guilt

You stand there, staring. Watching your child disappear beyond the school gates. What if they get it? What if they’re ill? What if you all get it and then you can’t go to work anyway? What if you’re really ill with it, and the longer-term symptoms just won’t budge? Visions of your future ill or depressed energy-less self appear in your head – and they’re really hard to shake off. Are you actually doing the right thing?

Sorrow

Parents are on the school group WhatsApp chats (constantly) asking questions about how to log on/make the video work/submit the work, and your friends message in despair, tearing their hair out at the frustratingly difficult job of trying to teach their own children. You feel vaguely happy you’re not experiencing the same sort of pain, but also sorry you can’t help or even empathise particularly well.

Small joy

Let’s not go overboard here. Joy is an emotion very few of us have genuinely experienced during the last few months. But when your kids come home from school, or skip out of the playground declaring they’ve had the best day ever and that they’re so glad they’re in key worker school, a small part of your heart truly sings. If they’re happy, you’re happy. Now we just need the vaccines.