I’m going to be unbearably smug.. if I survive lockdown
GIVEN that pretty much every objective I had at the start of this has been cast into the nappy bin, I have set myself a new goal.
I want to come out of lockdown knowing in my heart that I was the best in the world at moaning about it.
It’s clear the main problem with lockdown is being stuck at home. Whatever the size, being confined for so long makes almost any space (and any arrangement within it) intolerable after a while.
The real battle centres in the mind. Digging deep to locate reserves of patience and resilience.
Sadly, the blind faith and emotional labour required to plumb your inner depths in search of whatever you need to get through a difficult moment increasingly turns up nothing.
There is little time for “self-care”. This is an unnatural way to live. Every solution presents new problems.
As I write this, having just got my children to sleep on the couch the cat has appeared and is now trying to scratch and bite them.
Mine are at an age where they cannot be negotiated with. They know only what they want in any given moment.
They cannot perceive what you want. What you need.
They can’t sense, for example, that you are holding back tears as you scrape the 50th bowl of uneaten food into a bin.
They lack the psychological software to know that when they tell you they hate you (because you have declined to give them what they want, when they want it, for the first time in a fortnight) that you might, in mushy-minded exhaustion, actually believe it.
The strategies to which I have returned for self-soothing and perspective are becoming harder to adopt. Others fail me entirely. Attempts at meditation are disturbed by quarrels over juice cups. Reading anything but the instructions that come with a Kinder Egg toy is futile.
There are, of course, moments throughout the course of a day when you feel yourself in the presence of the sublime. When you glimpse the changing world around you in high resolution. When you are overwhelmed with gratitude and cognisant you are living through a momentous time in history.
But these epiphanies are short-lived, stubbed out in the ashtray of permanent noise. The clamour unending, absorbed only by the newly painted walls, and newly fitted doors, and fancy household appliances that were supposed to make things better but became no more than canvases for the display of demonic toddler graffiti.
The organised chaos that makes child-rearing so challenging but ultimately rewarding slowly turns to mental torture in lockdown. There is no respite. There is no breathing space. Nobody is coming to help you.
For me, there is no glass of wine to make the dull moments more interesting. No spliff to distort the slow passage of time.
It’s just me, looking lockdown in the eye, determined not to throw away six months of hard-won sobriety. Yet every morning I wake up, it’s harder.
The only plus I see in any of this is that finally my wife and I have something no other parent can give us unsolicited advice on. Nobody can attempt to relate what we are really going through now to a rose-tinted version of what they think they went through.
Nobody can cut us off midsentence and say, “Have you tried such and such?” – because those people never had to live like this. Not even during the war.
In that sense, this ordeal is a massively smug and righteous victory for us. Perhaps that is some indication of how horizons have narrowed in my life.