A Day in My Life — Student Mentor, Chaos Survivor & Woman Who Hasn't Had a Hot Coffee Since 2019
Welcome to Casa Chaos. Population: six. Sanity level: negotiable.
Let me paint you a picture of a typical morning here.
My alarm goes off early. Optimistically early. "This will be the morning we leave on time" early. Spoiler: it is never that morning.
Within approximately four minutes of being conscious I have already tripped over three shoes (never a matching pair — just three random shoes from three different children), mediated a full diplomatic crisis over who looked at who funny, and discovered that yes, someone has actually, genuinely, literally cried over spilt milk.
I used to think that was just a saying. It is not just a saying.
There are five children in Casa Chaos every morning. Five sets of teeth that need cleaning. Five heads of hair that need brushing. Five people who are absolutely, categorically not morning people — and one of them is me.
It doesn't matter what time I wake up. I have tried 5am. I have tried 6am. I once tried 4:45am and I'm still not over it. We always, ALWAYS leave the house dysregulated and mildly hating each other. Every single day we pile into the car as though we've just survived a natural disaster, and every single day I pull out of the drive having forgotten my coffee.
Every. Single. Day.
By the time I've done the school run — which is essentially an unpaid taxi service covering approximately half the county before 8:45am — I have already completed what most people would consider a full day's work.
Then I clock in.
I work in education as a Student Mentor and part of the Rapid Response Team. Now I know what you're thinking — Rapid Response sounds very dramatic and fast and urgent. And you're right, it is all of those things.
The irony is not lost on me that the only thing truly rapid about me before 9am is my mouth. Nobody is running anywhere. We are surviving. There is a difference.
But here's the thing about mentoring.
It's quiet work. It doesn't look dramatic from the outside. There's no running (genuinely, there is no running, we've established this). It's sitting down with a young person who is struggling. Who feels invisible. Who doesn't know how to say "I'm not okay" but is showing it in a hundred different ways.
And I get it. Because some mornings I'm not okay either. Some mornings I'm the woman sitting in the car park at work having a little cry because she forgot her coffee for the fourth consecutive day and just needed ONE small thing to go right.
But I show up. And so do they. And somehow that's enough.
That's the job. That's the privilege. That's why I do it.
By the time I get home it's round two of Casa Chaos. After school arguments need refereeing. Dinner needs cooking. Homework needs chasing. Bedtime needs negotiating approximately forty seven times.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that I'm photographing Vinted listings, writing blog posts and trying to remember if I've eaten anything that wasn't a cold fish finger since Tuesday.
But this is my life. All of it. The chaos and the coffee and the mentoring and the thrifting and the five kids and the school runs and the dysregulated mornings and the absolute joy of it all.
I wouldn't swap it.
I might swap the cold coffee though.
— Aypril x 
