Welcome to pandemic parenthood, where pretty much every day is Bring Your Child To Work Day. Parents are stretched to their limits. Many of us are juggling careers alongside caring for and, in many cases, educating our kids—and doing it all at the very same time.

But there’s one silver lining to this: Our kids have spent much of the past year watching us hustle and it’s giving them a new appreciation for all the work that we do.

We’d say this video, which is going viral on LinkedIn, is a pretty clear indication of that. A mama named Colleen Chulis shared the clip of her eight-year-old daughter doing “an impression” of her WFH mother.

“I wasn’t sure what to expect. This was the first and only take,” Chulis writes of the video, which features the child doing… well, a lot of things at once. Which is a pretty accurate representation of any mama. She fields a phone call, takes handwritten notes, types on her keyboard and even pretends to discreetly tell her children to hold on while she takes her call. It’s a painfully relatable (and topical) scene.


“I’ll have to call you back a little later,” the girl says in the video. “The kids are going all crazy and I have to get on a Zoom call.” It’s funny because it’s true.

image 17 Motherly
Colleen Chulis on LinkedIn: My 8 year old daughter asked me last night if she could do an impression

www.linkedin.com

“I figured many of you might relate (and laugh) with the snapping and the multi tasking,” the mama writes of the video. “Covid changed a lot of things this past year and this has been a lot of my reality!”

The video has earned over 300,000 reactions and over 25,000 comments—including one from television personality Kevin O’Leary (also known as “Mr. Wonderful”), who wrote “fantastic, she has an acting career ahead!”.

The video is obviously adorable, but we can’t deny that there’s greater significance to it. It’s a brief (yet powerful) snapshot of what mothers are up against right now. The endless to-do lists. The competing priorities. The proverbial need to place multiple hats on the same head, all at once. The absolutely endless stream of responsibilities that have sent our already-impressive multitasking skills into overdrive. Mothering right now is hard, almost impossibly so. But it’s also pretty impressive, too.

So to this mama, and all the other moms who are doing it all under impossible circumstances, let this be a reminder: Whether you work for a paycheck, for the purpose of keeping your home running, or in some combination, you’re doing so much. Your kids see it and they’re better because of it.