Ordinary Mondays Feel Like Mercy

Today I opened WhatsApp to do one thing. I still do not know what that thing was. Somewhere between replying to a cousin, checking a message from another mother, and opening Telegram for a school update, my original reason for picking up the phone disappeared completely.

For the past couple of weeks, the sky had been quiet. No interceptions. No sudden sounds overhead. Just stillness—the kind of stillness that slowly tricks you into believing life has returned to its normal rhythm again. Then last Monday, there were a few interceptions again. Suddenly, the Telegram school groups became alive all over again.

The groups themselves are actually very organized; alhamdulillah, only the admins are allowed to post, otherwise I think all of us mothers would lose our minds completely. But even silent updates create mental noise. Especially when every notification might answer the question currently floating inside every parent’s head:

“Do we need to wake the children up early tomorrow?”

That one question changes everything. School? Online? Offline? Lunchboxes? Uniforms?. Do I prepare breakfast at 5:30 AM or let everyone sleep a little longer? The authorities are trying to choose what is safest, and I truly appreciate that. But uncertainty has a strange way of entering the body. For me, it feels like a mental buzzing—like twenty invisible tabs permanently open inside the brain.

I had to put notifications on silent because eventually, the sounds start feeling like somebody tapping repeatedly on my nervous system. But even muted notifications are emotionally loud. Around 9 PM, I usually stop checking updates completely and put my phone on Do Not Disturb. At some point, my brain simply cannot absorb one more update.

That is the strange thing about modern motherhood: you are expected to remain permanently reachable while also somehow staying mentally stable.

The older children usually help me now. Because most of the school communication is in Arabic, and I do not read Arabic fast enough for rapidly moving updates, one of the children will scroll through and give me the summary. Honestly, it feels like a very modern parenting sentence: my children translating school Telegram updates for me while my overheating phone battery struggles to survive another day.

The phone itself looks exhausted too. Unread messages. Muted groups. Battery overheating from too many open apps. Meanwhile, WhatsApp feels softer: friends, relatives, someone asking for a recipe, or checking whether school is tomorrow. All of this somehow lives inside one small glowing rectangle we carry all day long.

Sometimes I make tea. Sometimes coffee. Sometimes dua. Sometimes I cope through denial by scrolling unrelated things. And honestly? I do not even feel guilty about it anymore. At this point, protecting my sanity feels productive.

Tonight, finally, the announcement came: school will return onsite tomorrow, in shaa Allah. So tonight I prepared lunchboxes again. I yelled at the children to prepare their uniforms and bags. We went out for a small outing to get coffee and snacks before the routine starts again. Now the children are finally asleep (or at least I hope they are 😭), and I am sitting here posting this quietly at the end of a long Sunday night.

Beneath all the updates and uncertainty, there is something deeply human in all of this: parents trying to prepare, teachers trying to adapt, and families trying to create stability even while waiting for answers themselves. Maybe that counts as a form of love too.

After weeks of uncertainty, ordinary Mondays suddenly feel like mercy. Hopefully tomorrow will be a day filled with barakah, routine, sleepy school runs, packed lunchboxes, and the kind of normalcy we once took for granted .

Alhamdulillah for ordinary days.