OFF THE CLOCK
Helena Lee recalls the challenges of parenting in a pandemic, and the liberation of life returning to normal
It was the morning we’d all been waiting for. After I’d wrestled Darcy’s pillarbox-red sweater over her head, plaited her hair and fastened the ends, and waved while she skipped off to school for the first time this year, all I could hear was a beautiful silence. Until home-schooling began, life after lockdown hadn’t been so different from life as it was. For parents with young children – my daughters Darcy and Margot are both under five – exclusion from nursery due to various bugs, an inability to spend carefree evenings out with friends and weekends at the park are remarkably familiar.
Then lockdown 3.0 hit. We were comparatively fortunate: Margot was still going to nursery, we had good support from Darcy’s school, where she had just started in reception, and my husband and I were able to work from home. All the same, it was taxing, to say the least. Time dissolved as we got pulled from lesson to task. Darcy couldn’t do anything by herself (she is only four after all) and wanted to show us even the smallest achievement. Our work days, filled with meetings, were devoted to building castles out of loo roll; meanwhile, she became fluent in the language of Microsoft Teams, learning to read ‘Join’, ‘Dismiss’ and ‘Apply background effect’ before she could puzzle out ‘bear’ or ‘ear’. When we took our daily excursion to the park, she would go up to strangers and just talk them, desperate to interact with people who weren’t her parents. We got up at 6am to sort out her homework and project admin, which was as time-consuming as our own, and completed our own jobs at night after the children were in bed.
‘Thank God they sleep the full 12 hours at night,’ we thought. Then Margot, who is two, started teething again and waking up every couple of hours, while Darcy crawled into our bed with nightmares. Even the freedom within my own unconscious had disintegrated, as did my rationality, patience and any maternal feeling I was clinging onto to get me through. I would look forward to mundane tasks like washing up, just so I could be alone with my thoughts, free from being needed, emotionally and physically.
And so when 8 March came, after we had spent 80 days, or almost 2,000 hours together, and children throughout England went back to school, I felt liberated. Liberated from having to be present the whole time; liberated from the constant guilt of not doing anything right, either by my work or by my child. I no longer had to sneak a look at my emails while pronouncing blended sounds in phonics lessons, or laugh off Darcy climbing on my head during serious meetings at work. While I do miss her terribly – her clever quips and company, I also appreciate the blissful truth: that silence is particularly golden.