In some ways time seems to have stood still, or rather thickened. It used to flow freely from day to day, thrust onwards by plans or hopes or fears. But now it is all clogged up, the pipes have shrunk and are creaking under the strain.
Days are unnervingly the same. I get up, make banana-oat pancakes, drink coffee, placate a headstrong toddler and attempt to feed her before bundling her into bed and collapsing from exhaustion. For me, 6 weeks on from what I think was a COVID-19 infection, my lungs too feel clogged with thickened air and my pipes have narrowed. Breathless has become my new normal just as the one-way system in the Co-op now seems the only way to shop.
The sunshine adds to the surreal air, like we’ve stumbled into someone else’s reality – one with blue skies and solitude ,not drizzle and small talk about the chance of fair skies.
My husband and I have carved out tiny airholes of freedom from our parenting responsibilities. He runs or cycles, I meditate or read. It gives us both the opportunity to exist for ourselves, not as a function of another, defiantly demanding, person.
The daily briefings are becoming commonplace – less action movie plot twists and more the drip drip drip of council meeting minutes, the kind I used to plough through as a news journalist looking for juicy morsels amongst the dry fodder of administrative life.
Similarly, the numbers have lost their shock value. They seem almost historically distant – like the numbers lost at the Somme or in the Blitz. Only when a personal connection cries out from the roll call of lost lives does it hit home.
I still feel relatively positive, bearing in mind I have spent a lot of my adult life feeling varying degrees of suicidal. I’ve always been better in an external crisis than inside my own head. That’s why I’m actually looking forward to going back to some nursing work – it’s nice to be doing something you know is important.
Equally I’m looking forward to being needed by others who are not my own daughter. Perverse as it sounds, their needs can be more manageable precisely because they are less personal. The responsibility for them is collective – shared by colleagues and left behind at the end of the day. I don’t compound the challenge of meeting their needs by feeling guilt and shame and resentment.
So the next few weeks will see a shift in the landscape for me, if not the nation. My horizons will expand to include hospitals and patients – I’m just hoping my lungs keep expanding too.