Today I’ve been reflecting on the 5th anniversary of the start of lockdown. I know the official “Day of Reflection” was on 9th March but that didn’t feel like the anniversary to me. I was still commuting that day, had just had an IRL IWD and even as late as 12th March I wrote: “It sometimes feels like we’re definitely living through a crisis and other times it doesn’t. I’m just eating my sweet potato gnocchi and chorizo jam that I procured in Walthamstow this afternoon….but this morning Boots at Liverpool Street had been stripped bare of Calpol and kids’ vitamins and Tesco ran out of pasta and loo roll last week. Surreal times.”
Friday 13th, on the other hand, felt like the start of the end of the world. It’s the day we left work and never went back to the way that things were before. We still had a very sparse D2K that weekend and an uncertain church and schools would be open for another few days….but Friday 13th was the start of my Life on the Inside that would carry on for years.
I should say at this point that I know there were horrific losses during the pandemic and I understood that lockdown was a necessity. I know that some families had much more tragic times than we did and so anything I have to say on the Covid period is going to be whiney and self-indulgent but feel free to stop reading if you know that’s going to annoy you. This post is less a reflection on the horrors of the pandemic than it is a dwelling on lingering effects of lockdown.
Again, self-indulgence ahead. In the words of Kathy and Stella, consider this your trigger warning.
OK, let’s start then. 13th March was everything properly changed and it’s hard to put a finger on when it felt like we were almost normal again. I think I’d probably say March 2022 – that’s when we had a church weekend away, Eva was performing in her Shakespeare for Schools production and we were back to in-person choir rehearsals. But it really was only just back. We’d been sent home from work in December 2021 because of Omicron and although Christmas was “normal” it was again very uncertain. As a family, we had our first bout of the sickness itself in Jan 2022, along with literally half of Eva’s class. So Spring 2022 was the emergence from all that although far from our last stint of quarantine. Still, that is a full two years of pandemic life and that changes a person.
It isn’t hard to see how the kids changed in that time. They went into lockdown in Year 3 and 6 and emerged in Year 5 and 8. The doll-like 8 year-old of Spring 2020 was a much more robust 10-year-old in 2022. The boychild became a boy adolescent. They changed irreversibly, which is always bittersweet but more so when they miss out on precious childhood moments. Eva never really engaged with primary school again after lockdown and her previous friendship group fell away accordingly. Reuben started secondary school masked and distanced, which he bore stoically but it made me feel so sad for him.
And then there was me. I changed too. It felt like life went wonky on that March Friday and it’s never really un-wonkyed itself. Eva wasn’t the only one to lose a friendship group – relationships I had before lockdown were damaged by those tense social media times and I don’t think any of them went back to how they were before. The primary school parent life of end-of-term drinks and Mothers’ Day breakfasts may have restarted but I wasn’t really part of it. Some of that was because I’d started working full-time during the pandemic and never went back to that school-day work schedule I’d had before. Part of it was that one child had graduated from primary school and the other had detached herself so I detached too. Part of it was just life and people moving on.
But part of it was definitely me. Those long months at home changed me in a way I still can’t really describe. I’m more paranoid now, more edgy, less able to relax but also less able to cope with the physical demands of life that I used to pre-pandemic. It’s like when you go ice skating and everything is going fine but then you fall over. After that, you never quite skate with the same confidence again. You’re always anticipating the next fall. Even five years on, it feels like nothing is as steady as it once was. It all disappeared then, so could it happen again?
I don’t usually dwell on it though. Most of the time, I just busy myself with life and try to be grateful that we have our freedom back. I wrote some unimaginably self-indulgent stuff back in 2020 – about choir leading, home parenting, worship leading, my own sense of self – and I’m really glad I can go back to stalking MCU actors around London for blog content instead of that pap.
If you’re interested in all that pap, though, here are the links (which WordPress is not letting me embed properly today. It’s almost like it’s trying to save me from myself)
A Grim Old Time for Community Choirs (A Reblog)
A Shout Out to the Worship Leaders
Raging, Coping and No-Schooling
And I am truly grateful that we didn’t suffer the tragedies that so many did. I know there was so much death and so many lives ruined forever in ways that were far more tangible than some whiney middle-class girl who couldn’t get an online shopping delivery slot. So feel free to roll your eyes out of the back of your head but you don’t need to tell me how lucky I am to have survived with only psychological scars. I do know. But if you’re feeling similar – like nothing ever really clicked back into place in these last five years – then know you’re not alone.
It’s hard to know how to end this post, especially when I’m trying to be deep in thought but Eva’s watching YouTube and Nathan’s repeatedly playing (with no apparent irony) “What Kind of Noise Annoys an Oyster?”. March 2020 vibes, tbf. So I’ll just end it there and promise to go back to fries-and-stalking posts very soon.
