I found my silver lining in our weird new reality... and I hope you have too
It’s all a bit like those flashback scenes in The Handmaid’s Tale, this. If you’re not familiar with the TV series, it’s set in a near future nightmare world, and every so often the protagonist is cast back to a time when everything was, well, normal. Now when I see people on television hugging and laughing and sitting almost on top of each other at the dinner table, it feels odd. You can’t do that, I want to shout at them, but they’re too busy drinking Rockshore and having a good time in their pre-pandemic world. Ant and Dec now look more normal sitting in their separate bedrooms staring into their phones than they do as a larky couple in some pre-record from the old days. Was there ever a time when Claire Byrne
Live didn’t come from her shed?
On the plus side, it’s been weeks since I’ve woken up with last night’s make-up still on. It’s been weeks since last night, truth be told. As a result, my bedclothes and my skin have rarely been in better nick. My hair, on the other hand, is hilarious; its only silver lining the surprising revelation that it is, in fact, silver and not grey. When I shared that glad tiding with The Best Friend – back when we were still allowed to have them – she advised that I keep my new discovery under my hat, quite literally.
The stash of tickets behind my bread bin for Things I’m Looking Forward To is thinning out. So far I have missed a play, two gigs and three football matches. They all had the capacity to be Memorable Moments — but what I’m missing most is the stuff I used to take for granted: my mother at my kitchen table giving out about the weather, being able to buy new bras, not worrying about straying beyond a two-kilometre radius, Flexitol.
Most of all I miss human contact. I know not all households are social distancing at home — though unless small children are involved, I honestly don’t understand why — but we are all on remote control in our house. The kitchen table is extended like it’s Christmas and we are dotted around it, like some weird Harold Pinter play in which nobody likes each other. On those evenings when we gather together to watch a movie or, in my case, fall asleep, we bring kitchen chairs into the living room because only two people (one of whom is always me, for safety reasons) can sit on our large sofa. The last human I properly touched was The Best Friend’s daughter, who hugged me in the park three weeks ago because, with miserable timing, I don’t even have a dog to hug any more. Tweaking The Boy’s nipple during an argument over a jar was brief and, to be honest, a mistake.
But I just had to touch The Youngest. She’s been having the toughest time of all of us, between the dog and the exams and her theatre show being cancelled. I’m used to March meltdowns in Leaving Cert year, but the one she had the other day was something new and more wretched than any I’ve seen before. The catalyst was a history essay that should have taken 40 minutes but took her three hours because she typed it in order to email it to her teacher — but really, that storm has been brewing for weeks now.
And when it broke, I was helpless, standing nearby unable to console or comfort my baby with anything apart from useless words. I don’t think I have ever wanted to hug somebody more.
So I had an idea. I got into the shower cubicle, closed the glass door and called her into the bathroom. Then I used the hand sanitizer in front of her to thoroughly disinfect my (already washed) hands. I passed it to her then, through the crack of the door, and told her to do the same. Then, like the ancient foes who ended a brutal siege in medieval Dublin by ‘chancing their arm’ through a hole in the door of St Patrick’s Cathedral, I reached my sterile arm out through the crack and held her hand. To be honest, it made her cry more, but I thought it was bloody ingenious.
In other news, yesterday morning I put on a dress that I bought before all this and haven’t had a chance to wear. Then I took it off and put my tracksuit back on. But I looked in the mirror in my new dress and here’s the thing: silver roots and no make-up notwithstanding, I was still there. I hope you are too.