“One side of her heart longing, the other shielding” Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
The long-awaited roadmap, the route out of lockdown has left many of us in turmoil. We feel the first painful shoots of hope, the sense of beyond, of a world in motion with its face turned to the warming sun.
But can we bear to feel its rays? Do we dare to dream of a better future? For many, the last year has taught us not to hope, because with hope comes disappointment, and with disappointment comes a weary resignation.
In many ways it is safer to keep looking down. To keep our blinkers on and watch each day as it drip drips by. The ocean of the future would surely drown us. What should feel momentous is actually muffled as if we are hearing through cotton wool, next-door’s conversation not ours.
We have been in short-term survival mode, only it has not been all that short-term. For many of the new mums I work with, the road-map has served only to set their experience in stark and lonely contrast: they were the lost generation, the ones who laboured alone, who parented in isolation and are now going back to work. They are still grieving the loss of those first months of parenthood. They cannot just write the year off and carry on.
It will take time before they, and we, can find some meaning in this loss, and the many other losses so many have been touched by, and know how to carry it with us. We need to shuffle round inside and make room for a new and more complicated story than we were expecting. So too I have found with motherhood generally. What felt so keenly like a loss of self, identity, life is slowly and painfully – like a mouth full of braces – shifting to accommodate. Maybe trauma and momentous life changing events are like that – the glacial shifts of centuries rather than seconds.
But somehow the sunlight gives me hope. The clear cold light holds motes of dust, which dance and dive. Rather than a sudden intense joy, I think this time hope will emerge gradually out of the shadows if we can just let it come.