Parenting in a pandemic, the good, the bad and the pinging!

A parent writes about how she and her family have coped with coming out of lockdown.

I was asked some time ago how I felt about coming out of lockdown measures with the responsibility of having a child to keep safe. I couldn’t really answer at the time as circumstances didn’t feel stable enough to form any kind of opinion. To be thrown back into a second full lockdown in December was overwhelming for me... 

It curtailed our already modest plans, preventing us from seeing family members for more than an hour on Christmas Day which was especially hard for my son who just wanted to be with his cousin over the Christmas period. Worse than this though was the prospect of a return to home schooling in January, the thought of which sent me into a brief tail spin of despair as I had been sure that we’d got past our children being away from school.

 “Blue Monday loomed large and looked set to stay for most of January.”

As expected, January to March was a hard slog of working full time whilst juggling child care and home learning but we did get through it. We had Google classrooms this time around so it was a bit more structured but the return to school could not come quickly enough for any of us. I had no qualms about my child returning to school, they’d done it once before, safely, and the head teacher was amazing in the way she reacted to and implemented each new government edict.

Beyond this step I had no desire to rush into any other freedom measures, I was happy to continue wearing a mask and limiting my excursions to dog walks and food shopping for the few bits missing from our weekly grocery delivery. As talk of lifting measures increased and the media obsession with holidaying abroad grew, it made me more resolute to not book a holiday this year as there was still so much uncertainty.

A relaxing holiday break? Not so much
We were lucky to get away for a summer break to Cornwall last year and it was lovely to be away, but the underlying fear of unseen germs and dirt in an unfamiliar holiday let added another layer of stress to the whole experience beyond the usual sourcing, booking and organising that I felt I could well do without this year, (the accommodation was spotless and no one got ill, so it was also unfounded stress!) No, I thought, this year, we’ll holiday at home, we live by the sea we can have two whole weeks of day trips, eating out and sleeping in our own beds with our own familiar germs.

Re-emerging into the new normal
We had started to do more after school activities such as Cubs, cricket practice, regular play park visits with school friends and drum lessons as we felt that our son had missed out on this sort of interaction over the last year. It was tiring to get back into the habit of social (distanced) interaction, but it did start to feel like we were finally heading in the right direction.

As school holidays approached my partner and I discussed the activities that we considered “safe.” For a brief period, we had felt comfortable with the thought of the cinema and maybe even a day trip to a local Butlins holiday camp, but as Covid cases rose along with stories of the double-jabbed catching new variants we decided against any such ventures and would stick to outside activities for our two-week family staycation.

Testing positive
This has proved to be prudent as 2 days in, my (fully vaccinated) partner has tested Covid positive and we are now stuck indoors for 10 days dancing around each other so as not to breath in too much shared air as I’m still testing negative.

“I’m now finding ways to occupy a ten-year-old missing close contact with his father and seeking solace in the screen whilst randomly shouting “bloody Covid” as trips to the Pier or out for an ice cream are vetoed.”

Having to introduce a quarantine barrier between my son and his father has been the hardest aspect of self-isolation; they are very close and it’s painful to see the hurt in his eyes as I explain to him again why Daddy cannot play with him, join us to watch a film or put him to bed just now. He has adapted relatively quickly, no doubt due to the massive learning curve that he has undergone in the last year where not seeing and then seeing but not hugging relatives was introduced, along with sticking to your class bubble no matter how annoying some members of this tribe might be and being asked to wash your hands about a hundred times a day.

“During our isolation period, my son and I have formed an alliance, sharing bunk beds at night and filling our days with monopoly, hand washing, Lego, hand washing, gardening, hand washing and a hell of a lot of YouTube, Fortnite, Disney+ and hand washing!”

I am painfully aware of how lucky we actually are to have all of these distractions and some space, but also that we took a lateral flow test in the first place.

To ping or not to ping
Friends that we had stayed with got pinged, we did not, although had been to all of the same (outdoor) venues on the day in question that they had. None of us had Covid symptoms, were all double jabbed and in the habit of wearing masks inside shops, etc. beyond the increased liberties of “Freedom Day” as none of us felt it wise to drop these measures, yet a Lateral Flow and subsequent PCR were positive for my partner. Luckily this has prevented us visiting elderly relatives in our two weeks off, as well as drum lessons for my son with a teacher whose partner is about to give birth, and any other outdoor venues that we might have believed safe to attend whilst unknowingly spreading our secret hitchhiker.

It’s proven to me that we are far from the end of this, that preventative measures such as wearing masks and social distancing continue to play a huge part in the ongoing fight against Covid, and that we shouldn’t assume that the vaccine on its own is the answer. I hope that people do continue with or return to these community conscious practices as we tackle what I sincerely hope to be the last stages of this pandemic.

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