At the start of 2020, my eldest son was seven and my youngest was three. For as long as they could remember, I had left the house at about 5pm every weekday evening to go to my radio show, and I had worked late DJing on the weekends. “When are you coming home?” was my eldest son’s most asked question to me.
Lockdown meant that, one by one, all the plates I was spinning smashed to the floor. Suddenly we were in one another’s hair all day long. The tight home-schooling schedule unravelled quickly, but my youngest’s speech came on in leaps and bounds. My eldest created elaborate dens in the garden and bonded with our nextdoor neighbour. We explored every park within a three-mile radius. Sometimes, we drove around a post-apocalyptic London to see the sights minus the tourists: Buckingham Palace, the Thames, Hyde Park. It was a strange type of fun, until my youngest would start crying: “I don’t want to go home.”
I learned that my happy conviction in being a Londoner was conditional on regular pitstops to Dublin, to visit my family. As spring turned into summer and Ireland’s lockdown guidelines tightened, I became jumpy. I needed to get my fix of family to remember who I was. I hated the feeling of being locked out.
At the start, there were enthusiastic attempts to include the children’s grandparents in their home-schooling curriculum, but, as the weeks rolled by, the kids stopped engaging. I got cross with them, but really I was cross with the whole situation. Cross with the bad internet connections, the stilted interactions, the worry pulling at me all the time that something would happen to my parents.
With the announcement of the second lockdown in November, we shrank into each other. We pulled out the sofa bed in the living room and had family sleepovers, the room a mess of duvets and wriggling kids, biscuit crumbs everywhere. It was something to tie the week around. When December came with the news that we were going into tier 4 and we wouldn’t see the grandparents at Christmas, my youngest sat silent on the floor, eyes pulled wide, sucking his thumb, while my eldest wept.
Pressure mounted as school was cancelled at the start of the new year. We found a childcare bubble and the kids shared their days with another local family. It was a godsend. I could still work. And, when Easter came, the buds began to open up along with the world around us as restrictions were relaxed.
My kids are now aware that their world is unpredictable and that change, when it comes, can upend everything they know. Time will tell whether the pervasive fear of the past two years will have a permanent effect. I can tell you that they are currently happier and more settled than they have ever been. Maybe more resilient, too.
As for me, after two decades of charging forwards, the pandemic forced me to stand still. In doing so, I realised what I wanted. I wanted to eat dinner with my sons and to put them to bed at night. I wanted to be the parent who was plugged into their learning, who finally joined the class WhatsApp group. I wanted life to not feel like a game of Tetris any more. I was tired of unfulfilled obligations piling up and up. I was tired of trying to squeeze things in.
I had fallen in love with writing and knew this was a golden opportunity. I left my evening radio show and moved my working day to within school hours.
Now we eat dinner together and I put them to bed. I have witnessed the pre-bedtime hysteria that my husband had told me about with the traumatised air of a war veteran. I have learned that my sons need time to wrestle and chase each other around the kitchen after dinner. Every night, they change their minds about which toothpaste they like. My youngest always wants to read the same book about the life cycle of a shark. My oldest needs to know exactly which rooms I will go to after I walk out of his bedroom, and how long I will spend in each one.
I have learned that, for the past six years, I have had a knot in my stomach. It tightened with the fear of not having enough time to do all my work well. It tightened with the varying moods of my world-weary, after-school children and their reactions to me leaving to go to work. I had no idea it was there until it was gone. It’s a strange and pleasant feeling, this lack of knot. This stillness.
I watch my eldest when he reads his books to me at night, his little flat voice bulldozing through the words. For now I feel peaceful, but I know that nothing stays the same.
Annie Mac is a DJ and (as Annie Macmanus) a writer. Her book Mother Mother is out now
