It’s OK not to be OK: Shared reflections from two PhD parents in a time of pandemic

Adopting an intersectional feminist lens, we explore our identities as single and co‐parents thrust into the new reality of the UK COVID‐19 lockdown. As two PhD students, we present shared reflections on our intersectional and divergent experiences of parenting and our attempts to protect our work and families during a pandemic. We reflect on the social constructions of ‘masculinities’ and ‘emphasized femininities’ as complicated influence on our roles as parents. Finally, we highlight the importance of time and self‐care as ways of managing our shared realities during this uncertain period. Through sharing reflections, we became closer friends in mutual appreciation and solidarity as we learned about each other’s struggles and vulnerabilities.

Adopting an intersectional feminist lens, we explore our identities as single and co-parents thrust into the new reality of the UK COVID-19 lockdown. As two PhD students, we present shared reflections on our intersectional and divergent experiences of parenting and our attempts to protect our work and families during a pandemic. We reflect on the social constructions of 'masculinities' and 'emphasized femininities' as complicated influence on our roles as parents. Finally, we highlight the importance of time and self-care as ways of managing our shared realities during this uncertain period. Through sharing reflections, we became closer friends in mutual appreciation and solidarity as we learned about each other's struggles and vulnerabilities.

K E Y W O R D S
feminism, intersectionality, masculinities, parents, singleparenting, vulnerability

| INTRODUCTION
Protecting your family is one of the most important roles you can play as a parent, but what happens when you cannot shield yourself or your loved ones from the threat of trauma (Cobham & Newnham, 2018)? These reflections Amal Abdellatif and Mark Gatto are co-first authors for this article. provide a glimpse into the lives of two PhD parents. Amal is a second-year PhD student (international), an associate lecturer, and a single parent to a three year old and a 13 year old. Mark is a third-year PhD student (home), a research assistant, a co-parent with a 14-month-old baby (13 months old during reflections) and his wife works in the NHS. We are both exploring gender in the workplace for our PhDs. Our shared stories of the UK COVID-19 lockdown acted as both individual catharsis and collective empowerment. Through sharing, we both learned more about our intersectional identities and our efforts to act as protective shields for our families during this traumatic time. Importantly, we also chose to write together to expose and resist patriarchal models of gender through our divergent parental roles and converging feminist principles towards gender equity.
We present our reflective stories in three acts represented in a single day: morning, afternoon and evenings of 10 April 2020 -'Good Friday' (additionally recorded as a shared time-log exercise). This method provided a reassuring structure for us to work with, while also framing our lived experiences thematically and over a longer time period. We include snapshots of our 'Good Friday' to highlight how our days progressed with various points of similarity and differences. We also include reflections on our developing response to the lockdown from across a threeweek period from the start of the UK lockdown on 23 March until 8 April 2020. We intentionally shared our reflections with each other after each new entry to enrich our collective writing experience, a process which had the additional benefit of deepening our friendship and mutual admiration.
We were inspired in our collective writing approach by 'Writing Resistance Together' (Ahonen et al., 2020). We also drew on Grenier (2015) as a model for constructing our shared autoethnography in a quasi-conversational form that expresses insights into our shared truths. We present our captured stories as both ordered and messy including occasional spelling and grammatical errors; a messiness that reflects our lives. By making ourselves vulnerable in this way, we hope our reflective stories can pay tribute to the canon of emancipatory feminist writing (e.g., see Cixous, Cohen, & Cohen, 1976;Haraway, 1991) that challenges how we write about ourselves and our experiences as feminists who aspire to transcend gender binaries.

| MORNING: INTERSECTIONALITY AND IDENTITY
It is not sufficient to have an experience in order to learn. Without reflecting on this experience, it may quickly be forgotten, or its learning potential lost. (Graham Gibbs, 1988) We share similar identities as PhD students and parents. Through our reflective diaries, we found our experiences converge around these two intersectional identities (Crenshaw, 2018). Yet, our diaries also reflect how our experiences diverge from the other identities we hold; gender, ethnicity and co-parenting versus single-parenting; all of which influenced our pandemic reality. We echo Rodriguez, Holvino, Fletcher, and Nkomo (2016) in moving beyond the favoured triumvirate of gender, race and class to building a more complex ontology of intersecting sociocognitive categories in our experiences. As we both believe in the principles of social equity, we examined and acknowledged where our identities were privileged or discriminated against in a pandemic. We feel this represents a foundational step of our feminist reflective praxis. Being an international student, and a single parent with no family members here, I was heavily reliant on others' support. Whether this support related to childcare and schools. Or whether this support in the form of interacting or chatting with my colleagues and friends at university. Or even something as simple as taking a little break from all the pressures and responsibilities I am facing on my own by simply sitting in a café with a cup of coffee to think and reflect, while my kids are in their nursery and school. (Amal, 4 April) I find myself in this position as a PhD student and husband to a key worker, my wife is a doctor in the NHS … This was my first week of being an official primary caregiver for a sustained period of three days and it has been a time of self-discovery, love and protection … I have truly come to know him in a way that previous care just can't replicate. (Mark,23 March) 10:30 -Struggling to find an empty slot for grocery delivery, which means in the next few days I will have to go myself and leave my kids at home (which is very stressful with the long queues and that my toddler can't be left alone with her brother for long). I have been conscious in conversation with PhD student parents that our experiences are different to other PhD students. We must protect our study time. Just as we must protect our time with our families. And these two worlds, though, naturally will cross over. Always means that we strain to separate and retain difference. (Mark, 7 April) Moulding people and activities without mindfulness to individual circumstances. For example, delivering an online seminar assuming that I will be (by default) living with a partner who can help baby set the kids while teaching. Or even assuming that I will be ok with sharing the most private space, my home, my kids or even pets, with everyone.
Or simply assuming that while I'm in self-isolation, I will definitely (by default) have a neighbour/friend who can collect my medicine and drop it off at my door. Or if I got really sick I will have someone else, any other adult in my household, to contact 111 for me, although I am the only adult in my household. That was not my case.

(Amal, 30 March)
As a parent, whose parenting experiences are still in their relative infancy, I look to my co-author, as an experienced mentor of parenting. And someone, for whom I hold great admiration. As an extremely dedicated and resilient individual their sense of self and determination to succeed are qualities I would hope to instil in my child as a parent, and certainly qualities that inspire me as a as an aspiring academic and parent. (Mark, 7 April) 11:00 -Chatting with my son about plans to getting the school work organized, with targets, and timeframe to get it submitted. (Amal) 11:30 -Preparing an early lunchreheating pasta bake with additional cooked pasta to expand the meal. (Mark) I found reading the news, the tsunami of emails from everywhere (uni, school and nursery) to be very stressful and costing me a lot, at this time I decided to take a time off for my own mental health to be able to perform my role as the only caregiver, teacher, cook, entertainer and most importantly a friend to my kids … I decided to save my energy to what I care about most, and the reason why I wanted to pursue a PhD qualification, to make them proud and lead by example. Sometimes I cry, but when I see me kids, I feel I'm lucky I have them. Every day in the quarantine, my kids and I get closer and happier. We learned how to make pizza together, we planned a daily dance session, we practice a daily gratitude by having a triple family hug, we announced Fridays to be our movie popcorn day. Together, we are trying to create a little happy place in the middle of the chaos and cope with the new life, which seems not to be as dark as I thought it would be. (Amal, 28 March) The common experience that we can draw on is that of trauma and the need to protect your child act as a protective shield to your child's emotions. For me as a parent of a 13 month old child, I am fortunate in that I can shield my child, very effectively from the ubiquitous discourse surrounding daily news bulletins Internet traffic, television, updates, etc. However, I am acutely aware that my emotional presentation with my child can inadvertently transfer feelings of anxiety, distress concern tension to my son. I have therefore opted to shield myself from the daily news cycle.  -1990, p. 229) We found resemblance between our diary reflections around feminism and examining our femininity and masculinity in the context of COVID-19. We reflected on Mark's experiences of 're-embodied masculinity' (Connell, 2005) to embrace his caring role against the cultural template of 'hegemonic masculinity'. At the same time, Amal reflected on her resistance through single-parenting to the cultural template of 'emphasized femininity' (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). We present our non-conformant femininities and masculinities as a challenge to the institutionalized, 'assumed' and regulated practices around our gender (Butler, 2004).
13:00 -Cooking lunch while cleaning. (Amal) 12:00 -Lunch finished. He thoroughly enjoyed his pasta bake with some banana and orange segments to finish. It is very satisfying for me to see him eating the food that I've prepared. I feel a sense of personal gratification. I think it is very much associated with nurturing as part of my personality and the need for my food to be appreciated and to nurture my son. (Mark) I always rebelled and used my voice, even when I was forced not to, to raise my concerns on why women should be disadvantaged in relationships, systems and societies. Why as a woman, by default, I'm expected to have a limited career ambition and should only focus on creating a 'home' that supports, maintains and reproduce the masculine hegemony in society and workplace. Why my only role is to be a mother, a homemaker and a caregiver? This is not assume that I don't love and always prioritize my kids, but shouldn't this be the case for any parent? (Amal, 23 March) My personal version of masculinity has been constructed with a feminist framework. This framework of masculinity is very much designed to complement, my partner, my wife's career aspirations. She is the primary wage earner in our relationship. She has achieved a lot in her career and will achieve more. And I want to support that, as she develops in her career. I have been studying a PhD for two years now, and that study has actually meant that I've been able to spend a lot of time at home, supporting childcare with my wife, but my wife has taken time off to care for our son for his first year, and has therefore taken primary care responsibility during that time. So in some ways this period of time, has provided an invaluable insight into what it will be like to be the primary caregiver for future children that we have, if we are lucky enough to do so. (Mark, 31 March) 13:30 -Realized a complete silence while I was cooking, to find out my toddler so immersed in getting her artistic skills on the walls! A moment of collapse for me! (Amal) 14:30 -After lunch, helped her this time to draw ON the paper rather than the walls! Also coloured Easter bunny and little eggs. (Amal) 12:55 -I took him up and played his wind-up musical toy. I put him in his sleeping bag, read him a story and then put him in his cot. As usual, he was not happy about this. (Mark) I discovered new gender dynamics through interactions between my two children. My son (the older) practising some masculine domination over his sister. For example, asking her not to talk in a certain way as she is a 'girl' . I observed similar behaviour from my daughter towards my son. For example, seeing him wearing or playing with something that does not conform to his gender, she directly says 'this is not for boys, this is for girls'. Here, I realized how I come out as a feminist rather than only a mother and intervene in the conversation. I try to challenge the way I was raised (and resisted) and have the conversation with them both reflecting on how it is important not to gender things or behaviours and treat one another as equal. This involves things as simple as sharing their pictures on platforms like Instagram for instance. I believe this should only be done with their consent; it should not be something up to me to decide.… As a resistance strategy, I decided not to use any cameras while delivering any online sessions. (Amal, 2 April) My hope is that these bizarre unexpected weeks, if not months of childcare may illuminate for many who would previously have been ignorant of these realities … It may illuminate what it actually means to be a parent, and therefore, it may crystallize a degree of sympathy, if not, empathy for the lived experiences of working parents who cannot avoid their responsibilities through outsourcing. I personally hope to learn much more about the embodied experiences of caregiving … For one, I am already nursing, a lower left back gripe that is sometimes an irritation. It is something to take pride in having a member of your family who fights as front line against COVID-19. All NHS staff are risking their lives and the lives of their families to save others' lives. If I am to put myself in their position, it would be very difficult to even imagine it. In doing something as simple as shopping for essentials, I come back home very worried about what I could have brought to my household and spend lots of time sanitizing groceries to avoid any harm to my vulnerable son. If I am to think that these heroes are dealing with COVID-19 patients, working so hard to save lives, and at the end of the day they have a family at home to worry about, that would be very challenging if not traumatic. Thinking about Mark and his family, given that his wife is a doctor, it is hard to imagine or live their experiences, worries and the risks they are taking as a family to save others' lives. If I am to put myself in their position, I feel it would be very challeng-

ing. (Amal, 7 April)
Having a partner working in the NHS during this crisis is a very strange experience to reflect upon. Each day, when they drive off to work, I am aware that she is heading into the notional 'front line' of the pandemic where the risk of acquiring the virus is greatest. I am experiencing the duality of perception that I am shielding my son from the world, while also watching my wife step into the highest risk environment. I can try to protect my son, but I am helpless to protect my wife, while she protects, and saves the lives of her patients. When I consider this in the context of historic and fictional crises, I am conscious of the masculinized responses that still seem privileged today. In contrast, I am the parent left behind to care for their son while his partner repeatedly steps 'once more unto the breach' . (Mark,7 April) 4 | EVENING -TIME PRESSURE, VULNERABILITY AND SELF-CARE There ought to exist for the human being, in so far as [they are] conscious of being, a certain mode of standing opposite [their] past and [their] future, as being both this past and this future and as not being them [gender pronouns adapted]. (Sartre, 1956, p. 29) Our experiences of time have been stretched, squeezed and snapped at various stages of this pandemic. As our working days stretched into evenings, we tended to squeeze our time with more intensity until, with fatigue, we snapped. Some experiences converged, especially our moments of vulnerability and need to take time for self-care, while others diverged. Our need to compartmentalize our time as parents and PhD students acts as an ever-present pressure we both battle with. This is going to be a period of strain on families on individuals, and parents may feel this more than most especially those who feel the pressure to maintain working outputs, alongside maintaining high quality childcare for their children. During these coming weeks. With the best will in the world. I will not be able to replicate or even approximate the incredible experiences my son has when he is at nursery. Started to develop new strategy to help myself cope with the new reality that seems to be lasting longer than anticipated. The only problem is that the day has 24 hours! So, the sacrifice of sleep was the only solution, since I can't work at all while my toddler is around requiring full attention. (Amal,26 March) When I attempt to do more work in the evening I tend to find myself mentally and physically tired, until much later. This is when the occasional dragging of time during the day manifests as an inversion in the evening when time seems to flow very quickly as I tried to squeeze as much work into the end of my day as possible … doing work always feels like a race against time. It is a race that I will never win. (Mark, As PhD parents, we cannot escape the ticking of time and looming deadlines; we constantly feel this pressure, even at the best of times. The lockdown has meant we cannot produce the volume, nor achieve the quality of focus and output required to meet our own perceived expectations. With each passing minute, we experience prodding fingers and shouts for attention, which wrench us away from the immersion needed to produce our best work. In such a competitive discipline as academia, where success is measured on the 'publish or perish' continuum, our very survival as early career academics is at the forefront of our minds.

| CONCLUSION
In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity. (Albert Einstein) To be a complete individual, equal to man, woman has to have access to the male world as man does to the female one, access to the other; but the demands of the other are not symmetrical in the two cases. (De Beauvoir, 2011, p. 818) Reviewing our reflections, we have both been comforted by our two lives lived in simultaneously divergent, yet similar moments of vulnerability with our families. As we have shared reflections during these early days and weeks, we have grown closer as friends, despite the enforced distance we must observe. We have glimpsed behind the veil of our professional selves, allowed ourselves to share our precious private lives and gained something far more valuable in our mutual admiration for each other as people. As Amal has embodied the total parent from teacher to chef, carer, friend and protector, while squeezing in her studies; Mark has experienced periods of re-embodied masculinity as transient sole primary carer and support to his wife. Our experiences are unequal, but we have both gained unplanned access to the 'other' as working parents, peers and friends. It is this 'other' that builds our case to embrace our vulnerabilities as parents towards a collective strength that could endure beyond this lockdown.
Is this a beginning to an end or an end to a new beginning? Will we get back to the life we knew? In these ambiguous uncertain times, there are plenty of unanswered questions. Even with this ambiguity, we think everyone by now already will have a long 'To Do After the Lockdown List'. This could be something as simple as a friend's hug, a cautious handshake, a staff kitchen gossip, a chilled drink at the pub or that long overdue haircut! Since the lockdown started, in each household, we became a huge conglomerate of organizations. We are the university, the school, the nursery, the gym, the restaurant, the library and the hairdresser. Will we see this as an ugly experience that brought all social inequalities and injustice to the surface? Or will we see it as a great opportunity for family, self-discovery, open vulnerability, resilience, love, compassion and solidarity? Will we value one another differently, or will it be a matter of time before we get back to the 'old' reality of busy bees buzzing around the hive? All we do know is that this shared experience has meant more to us than we anticipated. We helped each other see the light at the end of our separate tunnels and, out of our solidarity as feminists, our friendship has blossomed.