I confess that I’m one of those people … one of the ones who loved ‘lockdown’.
The Lost Love Song
Somehow, in recent years, my life as a working and writing mother-of-three spiraled completely out of control. I never meant to have overscheduled children, but somewhere amid the sporting fixtures and music lessons, the driving, the batch cooking of re-heatable meals, the stuff-work (finding, washing, maintaining, replacing, packing, unpacking, repacking) and the extra work I needed to do to pay for it all, I had lost stopped being my children’s mother. I had become their taxi driver, their maid, their bank. On good days I was a boarding house mistress, enforcing the schedule. On bad days I was the crazy harridan standing at the front door shrieking time to go, time to go, time to go.
Then the coronavirus genie slipped its bottle and it all … just … stopped.
When the merry-go-round stopped spinning, I had a chance once again to mother my children. I was given a moment to catch my eleven-year-old twins right on the cusp of childhood’s end and enjoy them instead of merely managing them. And coronavirus pulled off something I could never have managed alone: it pressed pause on my teenager’s hyper-charged flight out of the nest.
Homeschooling taught me a lot about who my children are and how they learn. We were able to take detours into topics that fascinated them, and I learned a lot from their assignments. Such as what the internet actually is. Please don’t imagine some perfect scene. There were tantrums, and mine were some of the best.
Lockdown was busy, with both my husband and I working remotely while also managing the kids’ schoolwork, but being home all the time grounded us, gave us back a sense of spaciousness and possibility that we had entirely lost. We found time to bake the odd cake (nothing Insta-worthy – just packet-mix, with wonky icing), weed the garden and plant out vegetable seedlings. We binge-watched Harry Potter movies and painted the dog kennel (the colour scheme, using left-over paint, is hideous). Most precious of all, we instituted a quiet period before dinner when we just sat together and read books.
Here on our island, we have been lucky, and our ‘lockdown’ had the desired effect. Our ‘go hard and go early’ approach enabled us to control our few Covid-19 hotspots and arrive at the situation we’re currently in, with no virus on our island, and life feeling fairly normal.
But the pressure is building from the tourism and hospitality sectors, in particular, to throw open our borders. Although this is supposedly to be managed in a safe and gradual fashion, many of us feel that any relaxation will lead, inevitably, to a return of Covid-19.
Right now, I’m just trying my best to retain what I can of the calm and quiet of our time in lockdown, to keep my heart and mind inside the present day and to resist the temptation to look for too long at the horizon.