Two weeks ago, my husband and my daughter sat me down. They’d obviously been discussing something before approaching Big Bad Mummy (yes, I’m the bad guy in this house, which is always great fun). At first, I thought there was something wrong, but then Alison turned around and said the words I’d been expecting to hear for a while:

“Mum, I want to start walking to school. Not every day, but maybe two days a week…?”

“No way,” I snapped, with no hesitation whatsoever. “Are you mad? Too dangerous. You’re far too young.” And la-la-la, etc, etc, ad nauseum. My husband looked at me in surprise.

“Hon, it’s around the corner,” he reasoned. “Plus, she is eleven. She will be walking in secondary school, which is only a year away.” (That also stung hard. My baby is slipping away!) “We need to let her do it, learn how to take responsibility.”

I didn’t want to hear it. I flew into a silent rage and went to bed early, simmering because I hadn’t gotten my own way. But then I went on Google (of course) and was shocked to discover that it’s normal for kids as young as eight to walk as far, if not further, than our daughter was proposing to walk to school. And as I lay in bed, annoyed that Google had not taken my side, I realised that deep down, I don’t see Alison as an autonomous eleven-year-old preteen. (Well, sometimes I do. The mood swings don’t leave me much choice).

I admit that I’ve always been an overprotective parent, which is a direct product of the crippling anxiety that I’ve suffered from for as long as I can remember. Lately, however, while pondering how to allow my preteen some well-earned independence and keeping her safe at the same time, I wonder whether the pandemic affected the natural evolution of Alison’s independence. Is that why this sudden thirst for independence is such a shock to me – because of the lost time during lockdowns?

In the grand scheme of my own life, the three lockdowns we had in Ireland – from March 2020 to May 2020, from October to December 2020, and January to March of 2021 – don’t really matter. I was working from home anyway, I had a project to focus on (the compilation of Conversations about Activism and Change: Independent Living Movement Ireland and Thirty Years of Disability Rights), and I was involved in so many different organisations and advocacy groups that I often had two or three Zoom meetings a day. I soon got used to talking to friends over Zoom and Google Meets, even if I missed the intimacy of having dinner or a coffee together. All of this is now a distant memory, since we’ve supposedly returned to normal.

COVID has been around for approximately 1/13^th of my life. But in Alison’s case, it has dogged nearly a quarter of hers. COVID struck the year of her Communion, meaning that the occasion was postponed and the party that we had planned, complete with in-house entertainment and seventy guests, was scaled back to a family dinner in the Tullamore Court Hotel (that said, Alison has about sixty people in her extended family alone, including aunts, uncles and cousins). Even when schools reopened in 2020, things were not the same: she still had to social distance, she could only socialise outside in the cold, and she had one friend who was allowed in our house, as part of her “bubble”. 

It seems like a lot to deal with, and I assumed she was pretty angry about it all. On Saturday night, when I was tucking her into bed, I asked her how she felt about the last three years.

“You must feel like you missed out on a lot.  Like your friends.”

“Yes,” she admitted. “For the first month or two, things were pretty hard, and I did find it lonely on my own. But it wasn’t all bad. You really pushed the schoolwork.” She laughed. “Honestly, I think I did more work in those six months than I have in the whole of primary school. And I enjoyed the challenge.”

“So, are you saying that you didn’t mind lockdown?”

She laughed. “I never want to do it again, let’s get that straight. But,” she paused, “we did lots of things that we just don’t get time to do now – the art, the baking, building forts, the movie nights.”

“And you don’t feel annoyed about any of that? About the things you missed?”

“Nah,” she shrugged. “We spent time as a family, even if we did kill each other sometimes. What’s the point in being annoyed, when life is much better now?”

I went to bed on Saturday night, pondering on how her unexpected answers were going to change the trajectory of this blog. And instead of dwelling on the psychological damage she’s supposedly suffered over the last three years, I thought about the things that Covid has given her. Alison is a prolific reader, having read everything she could set her hands on during the course of the pandemic. Once I manage to wangle her Switch from her, she loves writing her own stories, going for walks and playing football and camogie on the green. Occasionally, she’ll complain that she’s bored, but I think that has more to do with the age she’s at (eleven – not quite a child, not yet a teenager). Over the next few years, she’s going to face some of her toughest challenges – fitting in, discovering who she is, dating, and growing up in a world obsessed with social media.

But I wonder now if the whole Covid experience had lasting advantages as well. Alison has become an expert at dealing with disappointment, with making do with the circumstances facing her. She’s had Covid four times: one bout resulted in her missing a gymnastics competition, and she came down with it before Christmas 2022, causing her to miss her class Christmas party. Both times, there were tears for about ten minutes, then she dusted herself down and focused on getting herself better. She isolated on her own, not wanting us her parents to be sick too, and just sat it out. Reader, could you have endured that isolation, at the age of ten? Even with all the TV, books and Nintendo Switches in the world, I know for sure that I couldn’t have.

And maybe – probably – I’m making something out of nothing, as per usual. Perhaps, I’m just using Covid to deflect from my sadness that my little baby is growing up. And truth be known, even if time slowed to a snail’s pace, I was never going to be ready for it.