Tag Archives: lockdowns

Wednesday Wonderings: Five Years Ago Today, the World Shut Down

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Today marks five years since the first Covid-19 lockdown in Ireland was announced by An Taoiseach, Mr Leo Varadkar, on 12 March 2020. Five years on, I’ve been reflecting on the surreal events that unfolded afterwards. Although everything is now back to normal, and many things are “as they were” before restrictions were announced, part of me cannot help but wonder whether as a society, we have collectively dealt with the psychological, emotional and economical impact of that uncertain period, which was followed swiftly by events that continue to unfold in Ukraine and Russia.

It was my good friend Shelly and late friend Leigh who first alerted me into thinking that this emerging virus in China was something to be worried about. I read back some of our group chats from late January/February 2020, and shake my head as I am reminded how the three of us tried to pre-empt what would happen next. I predicted that they might have to shut the schools for a few weeks, while efforts would be made to contain the virus. No-one could imagine the chaos that unfolded during the following weeks and months.

On the morning of 12 March 2020, while everyone around me was stocking up on tinned goods or toilet roll, I remember walking around Dunnes Stores looking for a nice Easter Egg for Alison.  I remember that I bought a few groceries as well, but I didn’t know what to buy. I just bought two bags of pasta and some noodles, along with four bars of soap (the pumped bottles were already sold out), while looking at people’s heaped trollies around me. The Easter egg was my priority. I could sense that Alison was going to lose so much in the coming weeks; she didn’t need to lose the Easter bunny as well.

Afterwards, I came home, feeling sick to my stomach. Despite being an avid reader of dystopian fiction, I didn’t know how I was going to deal with this uncertainty, nor how I was going to guide my eight-year-old daughter through it. That day, in an effort to distract myself more than being worried about my child’s education, I printed off a large number of worksheets from an educational website, thinking that if the world was about to be thrown into chaos and unpredictability, that it would be best to try and create some semblance of routine for the sprog.

That afternoon, when Alison came home from school, she’d just been informed that school was to be closed for two weeks, but even at the age of eight, she was clever enough to know that it would likely be longer. She asked so many questions, and for the first time in our lives, we had no answers. We sat watching the news as Leo Varadkar announced the lockdowns. John Paul had just started a career break, and I remember the relief that he would not be working and exposing himself to the virus. I became institutionalised very quickly, accepting isolation as the way things had to be. Like millions of us, I threw myself into work and homeschooling in to keep busy, trying to suppress my nervousness at the uncertainty around me. (What are the psychological effects of this now, I wonder?)

The world was thrown into autopilot, and slight lunacy. It became an offence to meet up with others, to take a drive into the mountains or to the beach, or to travel further than a 2km range from your home. Only one person could go shopping from a family at any given time. We had to mask up and keep our distance from those we loved, not only for two weeks, but for the guts of eighteen months. Hugging a friend was seen to be first degree murder. The message was, do you want your granny to die, all because you couldn’t resist giving your loved one a quick cuddle in the supermarket? What long-term effect is this messaging still having on people, especially children? 

In July 2020, Alison attended a socially-distanced drama summer camp in the local youth centre. I was apprehensive, but more concerned about my only child becoming too isolated from other children. After the second day, her drama facilitator messaged me to say that my eight-year-old daughter had told her that she had predicted the coronavirus pandemic, that she’d had a dream the week before restrictions announced that told her that something bad was going to happen in the world, and because she hadn’t told anyone she believed, essentially, that she was to blame for the entire pandemic. My heart turned to ribbons as I thought of the psychological burden that my little girl was carrying This is the unspoken impact of the OTT messaging behind the pandemic. We, her parents, were stunned as we explained, repeatedly, the scientific reasoning behind it. It took a long time to convince her, and even now, I see the damage that carrying that awful “secret” did to her.

Nobody in their right minds would ever want to return to those dark days of lockdown, although I will admit that it took me a long time to regain the confidence to put myself back out there and claim my life back. I became institutionalised in the safety of my home, going from somebody who went to Dublin at least twice a month, just because, to someone who didn’t go anywhere, until last year. 

We’ve had a rough few years that we simply have not been allowed to collectively recover from: COVID, the Ukraine-Russian conflict, economic instability, and now fecken Trump, so as we reflect on five years since the lockdowns were announced, we must remember that we have been through a great deal of collective trauma, and to give ourselves a break. And to congratulate ourselves, too, for doing our best in such unprecedented circumstances. 

The Lost Years – Tuesday Thoughts 2

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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 1/13th 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.