Love After Lockdown
Four Kiwi whānau found that what could have been a testing time has actually enriched their relationships for good.
Real life relationships that improved for the better
Don Scott and his sister Rose Scott
As Don Scott and his wife Cheryl were heading back from a caravan holiday in the South Island to their home in Gisborne on the Tuesday before lockdown they started discussing Don’s sister Rose Scott who was living in Tauranga.
Rose is 70 and has dementia and while she had daily good care and support living on her own, Don started to worry about what would happen during lockdown.
“I got home and rang her caregivers who said it was all good, but there would be a problem if one of them got sick. And that was the bingo moment really,” says Don. “I knew that because Rose was so vulnerable it could be a disaster.”
He set off the next day, March 25, the day before Level 4 lockdown began, with the intention of finding some sort of care for her in Tauranga but after calling several agencies he realised that the best thing would be to take her home with him.
“I arrived at her house with some food and said ‘We’ll hunker down for the night here and then we’ll drive to Gisborne tomorrow’. Then the civil defence alert came up on my phone saying ‘where you stay tonight you stay for a month’ and that was it. I bundled her into the car and headed off. We arrived home in Gisborne at 11.45pm.
“Rose had been to stay with us for the weekend a few months earlier so we had a good idea of where she was at in her dementia, but it wasn’t until we got her back with us that we realised she wasn’t eating that well. She would forget to eat,” says Don. “She has been a delight to have, she’s so gentle and lovely.”
Every evening at 4.30 Don says he gives Rose a bowl of chips, which she loves, a glass of wine and then he gets out the guitar. More recently his granddaughter Rosa, who lives next door, has been free to join their bubble and so he sings to Rosa and Rose just loves it, dancing and clapping.
“It turns into a singalong for half an hour or so and I’m flattered because they both think I’m an amazing guitar player and singer and Rose never wants me to stop.”
After a few days of having Rose to stay in lockdown Don and Cheryl decided she wasn’t going back to Tauranga. She would stay living with them.
“Lockdown helped us get to a decision we would probably have made six months later anyway. We wanted Rose here with us but she had such good care in Tauranga we hadn’t wanted to disrupt her.”
Don and Cheryl have since moved Rose’s possessions and furniture to Gisborne, giving Rose endless hours of joy as she retrieves valuable items she thought were lost.
Don says Rose seems really happy, is putting on weight, and when she asks why they’re looking after her he has a simple answer.
“I tell her that when my first wife Jan was dying 28 years ago she just turned up here to help me. She quit her job and moved in. That puts it all into perspective really.”
Hannah and Bhanu Thakur
Hannah and Bhanu Thakur had their wedding celebration in Sydney on February 29, just weeks before Australia instigated COVID-19 lockdown measures. The couple had dated for a year but had only recently secured a flat where they could live together, so had no experience of full-time married life.
“We were going to slowly move in together,” says Hannah. “I wanted to move Bhanu in slowly so I could get used to it.”
The couple had expected their life post-marriage to be the usual round of both working long hours and getting together for meals and outings when they could. Instead, Hannah worked from home in her role as copy editor of NW magazine in Sydney and Bhanu’s hours as a chef were reduced. So the couple have been spending more time together than ever before.
“It was like we’d gone on a honeymoon and spent all that time together but we didn’t have the travel aspect. I’m calling it a staycation honeymoon, and I think it could really catch on,” says Hannah.
“It has just proved to us that we were meant to be,” says Bhanu. Hannah adds, “It’s also taught me that I was probably overthinking everything because our relationship was quite young before we married and everyone says you can’t marry someone until you’ve lived with them! But I think it’s worked because we really do get on so well and we didn’t have any underlying tension in the relationship before.”
The lockdown did stifle plans for the couple to travel to New Zealand for Bhanu to meet Hannah’s large family, who couldn’t all make it over for the wedding. But through video calls they have spent lots of time talking to both families in New Zealand and in Nepal.
During their time together the couple have found their favourite things to do together, too. For Bhanu it is simply talking with Hannah. And for Hannah it is watching Bhanu cook for her.
“It turns into a singalong for half an hour or so and I’m flattered because they both think I’m an amazing guitar player and singer and Rose never wants me to stop.”
Carly and Dave Flynn
Two weeks before lockdown, journalist and broadcaster Carly Flynn was dealing with the fact that her cameraman husband Dave Flynn had lost all his work due to events being postponed.
“We were wondering what to do about our financial situation during Level 4 when I got a call from the executive producer of The Café,” says Carly. “He suggested that Dave could shoot the show and I could host it, all within our bubble in our lounge.”
That was Monday afternoon and by Wednesday at 9am Carly and Dave were shooting using the Zoom video-conferencing app.
“Dave and I met when we worked together in the Waikato in 2000, but that was before kids,” says Carly.
The couple soon found they loved working together again. “The only difference is we now have three kids,” says Carly. “We would start filming at 10am so between 9am and 10am we would set up the studio and get the kids sorted. Tilly (9) and Jude (8) needed to be set up for their home-school work and Freddie (3) would be put in front of baby-appropriate programmes. The only problem is the older kids knew that once that red light on the camera went on their parents were trapped. So they would leave their school work and settle down in front of the TV with Freddie.
“Despite my attempts in between interviews to restore order there were sandwiches stomped into the carpet, far too much screen time and really it was two days of living in a grungy home!”
But Carly says they learned that you can’t be everything to everyone and figured it was going to be okay.
“Dave and I have created a pretty tight little family unit because we don’t have family support around us. We used to have a diary system so that whoever had work, worked and whoever didn’t looked after the kids.
“But lockdown taught us that we can take things slower. We had seven weeks where I got to know my kids’ personalities so much better. I don’t want to go back to the pace of how things used to be.”
Carly says before lockdown she stressed about after-school activities for the kids and whether she was spoiling them.
“Now we’ve adapted to another way of life, which I think is much better and happier for all of us.”
Danielle Thorpy and her mother Mavis Thorpy
Within days of New Zealand going into Level 4 lockdown, Danielle Thorpy’s mother Mavis Thorpy was notified that she was at risk of having the COVID-19 virus.
She had attended a conference where Marist College teachers were in attendance. Mavis was told that she had likely been in close contact with someone who had tested positive and was therefore part of one of the first COVID-19 clusters to be discovered.
“It was all pretty low-key at that stage,” says Danielle. “They basically told her to self-isolate for 14 days and that would be it. But she is 70 and I was worried.”
Danielle and her boyfriend Daniel Ellison were both working from home and had planned to spend the whole month of the Level 4 lockdown with Mavis as they were both concerned about her being on her own. It had only been a year since her husband Peter Thorpy had died on March 9, 2019 and they didn’t want her to be facing this alone.
“We had to wait for her to get through those 14 days but then we moved in with her for the remaining two weeks, which was the longest time we have spent together for a while.
“I am an only child and I left home just before my 19th birthday so sharing our daily habits with each other was quite different to visiting her once a week, which is what I usually did.”
Danielle says she was always very much a Daddy’s girl as she shared a similar personality with her father, so after his death she and her mother had to work out how to be a family without him.
“Mum is a teacher so gradually through the lockdown she got busier marking homework and organising lessons on the computer. We shared cooking the meals and her house has two living rooms so we were able to have some space if we needed it.
“But I did have to say on several occasions that we need to have no talking for half an hour because when I’m on my phone I’m relaxing but Mum just keeps talking!”
When Danielle and her boyfriend returned to their own home she realised that the lockdown had been an opportunity for her and Mavis to find out what their new family situation was like after a year of grieving for her father.
“Mum now sees that there are three of us in the family. She got to know my boyfriend a lot better and they get on like a house on fire. In fact they would quite often gang up on me in the house! “It definitely helped us discover our new normal as a family.” At the beginning of lockdown Danielle had been scared that she might lose her mother to the virus so soon after losing her father.
“But now I know I have this amazing new family unit of the three of us and we’ll be spending more time at Mum’s place from now on.”
“Lockdown taught us that we can take things a little slower. I got to know my kids’ personalities so much better. I don’t want to go back to the fast pace of how things used to be.”
Carly Flynn