‘I need certain things to be the mother I want to be’
Everyone’s pandemic was different. In years to come when we reflect on 2020 what will we come up with? Maybe we’ll remember the clapping on doorsteps or quiz nights on Zoom? How we learned that, to quote Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way”. Or will my abiding memory be of Madonna in her bathtub giving a tone-deaf sermon about how Covid-19 is the great leveller, how we are all in the same storm? The same storm indeed, Madge, but some of us were in luxury yachts and some of us were barely clinging to the life raft.
My life raft for this storm was small and extremely crowded. I welcomed a third baby in late February about three weeks before the world changed. One hundred days of no solitude is one of the toughest things I’ve experienced, maybe even as tough as the total isolation many of my friends had to contend with. Tougher than the myriad individual griefs and hardships suffered around the world? Probably not — but as Philip Larkin once told a friend in a letter, “Your life is the harder course I can see, on the other hand mine is happening to me”.
In pandemic, I learned, albeit belatedly, that I am probably not “mother material”. One day in the depths of lockdown, I savagely screamed at my eldest child. I apologised and can only hope that when he remembers the lockdown of 2020, he remembers more than this desperate moment. Maybe he’ll remember the secret tree house we built in a local park or the days drawing in the yard or the hoops I jumped through to secure a second-hand trampoline for him.
For me, I found lockdown to be a punishing, gruelling marathon. I adore my kids, I adore my work but trying to adore those two things at the same time for three months in a confined space was not possible — throw in homeschool, a newborn, mastitis, not one single full night’s sleep or more than an hour or so to myself in all that time (I am writing this very column with a baby on my lap), well, it’s a goddamn miracle I’m still here.
And where is “here” now? We are supposedly coming out the other side — though for working parents the “loosening” is something of a misnomer. Nothing much will change until the return of schools and childcare. Still there is movement, my mother can now help me with the baby, a playdate with friends brings so much happiness. Simple, simple things that ease the monotony. And at the height of lockdown, the things that helped me were so simple too. Every Sunday my friend and I painted together over Zoom.
I lost myself in the tiny worlds that leaked from pen and brush on to the pages before me. I drew from old photographs and painted the people I love. My friends, my parents and my children. The people I was missing and the life I was missing. I hadn’t painted since school and was astonished at how in these moments my anxiety seemed momentarily suspended and my body unclenched.
In the post-lockdown world I am desperate to rest. As restrictions ease, I will be taking every offer of help I can without shame or guilt over my inability to cope. I have learned in the most visceral way that I need certain things to be the mother and friend and person that I want to be. I need if not a room of one’s own as Virginia Woolf prescribed, then even just a moment of one’s own. A moment in which to find yourself, forgive yourself and forget yourself.