I'm envious that you've all got to spend so much time with your children. I know you don't realise it now but the most precious years of parenting are the years where you can do that kind of stuff. Regardless of any virus.

Moments where you can take a cardboard box and turn it into anything you want to. Where you can head to the oval and just loll about on the grass looking up at the clouds. Where you can bake a cake that will sink in the middle and not taste very nice at all but licking the beaters is great fun. Where you can fit both your children on your lap at once and that moment feels like heaven.

I can understand that perhaps, during this period, that is the very last thing you want. You're working from home. Trying to do all those important things that pay the bills, only to find that your children need you more than ever. That they are aching for every opportunity to sit on your lap, for every opportunity to have a conversation with you, because, for the first time in a long while, they actually have your presence.

And then there's all that business of homeschooling, which you're not doing, not for one minute. I have enough friends who are school teachers to know that they are actually working harder than if they were in a classroom in front of your child.

I feel sympathy for my teacher friends, because I was one of those "involved parents", able to, because I chose to work part time, because I deemed that spending time in my young children's lives was more important than earning EL2 money, who spent a few hours in school each week helping with readers or PE classes or indeed working in the canteen while I worked part time. These things matter. So many people, even now, when I have one year left of school left, say how "lucky" I was to do that. No. I made that choice. And sacrificed a lot to do that. I don't regret it for a minute.

I hope there's a bunch of you realising now that you have no idea what "schooling" is all about. But maybe, when things get back to the new normal, you might remain interested in art lessons, or reading, or science experiments.

I want to say give your children your undivided attention for as long as you can, let them climb all over you, slow down and enjoy sitting down for lunch and dinner, find time to read stories and go for walks, to look at ducks in the local pond, or to watch Frozen 2 for the 17th time. Because all that ends.

I know because my beautiful children are turning 19 and 17 during the time of coronavirus. (Do we have a name for this period yet?) Both turning ages where they shouldn't be locked down, kept away from their friends, unable to work lowly paid hospo jobs for money to spend at nightclubs, nor able to play sports they love with their dearest mates in the world. It's not fair. Not fair at all. But maybe it will actually make them take stock and think about what is important to them.

I'm thinking about all this because it's Mother's Day. I miss being in my peak mothering days. Those days, as mentioned, where kids would actually like to spend time in your lap. Mine are well past that. They talk to me now about how they miss, not hanging with me, but being with their friends, how they miss working, or how hard it is to work on burgeoning friendships with people of the opposite sex. Although burgeoning is a word they would never use.

I know I am not the most important person in their lives anymore. And that kills me. Although really I am, they just don't know that. But I'm not. I hate that fact, to my very core. But I am happy and proud and excited that that's actually the case.

For as much as I want to be complaining about the struggle of working from home while my children are trying to learn from home, for as much as I would rather be spending my afternoons with them and a frisbee at our local oval, for as much as I'd rather have them curl into my lap every evening to tell that story about the virus and how we all came to love each other more because of it, that's not where my family is at.

My family is at the brink of a new start. And if this bloody time of the world doesn't set us all right for that then what has been the point of it?

Happy Mother's Day girls. Be brave.