Every journey back towards happy starts with small steps... and Easter eggs

In the end, it was a plate of spaghetti bolognese that did it. We are all sad, but The Youngest is saddest of all. She has lost the dog she had loved for as long as she could remember, her Leaving Cert is screwed up and in the lap of the gods, her beloved theatre group has disbanded and she hasn’t seen her friends for weeks. Throughout, I have tried to reassure her with occasional old episodes of 30 Rock and a promise that this too will pass, but as the days have turned to wretched weeks, that reassurance has sounded increasingly hollow. And now she’s so sad that she’s not sure she will ever be happy again.

Last Saturday was the worst. It should have been the first day of her Easter holidays, and, in a parallel universe, would certainly have involved her hanging out with her friends. Instead, I managed to coax the neighbour’s cat into our porch, where, in exchange for ham, he allowed me to stroke him (I am highly allergic to cats, but I had a plan). Then I summoned The Youngest to the porch and suggested she too enjoy touching a living thing. Except the little fecker (the cat, not The Youngest, who is actually considerably bigger than me) was having none of this new contact and hightailed it under next door’s car, while The Youngest stood desolately at the garden wall waving an unwanted piece of ham.

And then. At almost the exact time she was due on stage in her play at the Mac Theatre in Belfast, she took her plate of spaghetti bolognese off the counter and turned to put in on the table, colliding with me as she did so. Even as the entire meal was still sliding down the back of my Tshirt and onto my tracksuit bottoms, her howl of anguish could be heard a safe two kilometres away. It was the last, the very last straw. I have rarely witnessed grief like it and in that second, all protocols and social distancing were forgotten. My baby was in bits and surrounded by the detritus of her dinner, I hugged and hugged her until my tomato-sauce flavoured arms ached.

So, enough. The rest of them can keep at arm’s length but she and I are no longer avoiding each other. We’re in it together now, for better or worse. And there’s other tiny traces of the old normal returning too. Not dangerous, irresponsible stuff; just little efforts to try to stop us all feeling so sad. Today might be an Easter Sunday like no other – to borrow from the Taoiseach’s exhausted speech writers – but in this house, we are putting on real clothes and make-up. I am considering shaving my legs. Either way, we will sit down together to our usual feast of roast lamb, chocolate eggs and liberal amounts of wine. We won’t have our usual house full of family, but they will all join us on Zoom for at least some of the meal.

That latter element is, of course, dependent on The Sister managing to teach The Mother how to use Zoom – which, given that she can only barely use her mobile phone, will be no mean feat. A couple of years ago, I set Scrabble up for her on her phone and showed her how to play it: it occurred to me afterwards that it would have been easier to launch her into outer space. Now, when I log onto my own Scrabble, I see her name there and the last date she played – literally the day I set it up and tapped in a single word for her – and that was back when we were allowed to be in the same room as her. Now, being of a certain age in uncertain times, she is cocooning for Ireland and the only real contact she has with human beings is when we drop off her shopping and wave at her across the room. So she will need to be Zoom-schooled remotely, which The Sister has gamely volunteered to do. This is the same sister, incidentally, whose graduation ceremony was captured in perpetuity by the same mother in a long series of photographs of her (the mother’s) eye, the look of concentration in which, to be fair, was commendable.

Anyway, it will be nice to see that eye again, later today, in some shape or form. Seeing both eyes might be an ambition too far. But every journey back towards happy starts with small steps. May you, and all the people on your Easter Sunday screens, take some yourselves today.