It’s her mantra. Poppy’s. She says it when she is snuggling, as she gently strokes the back of your hand, she says it if something goes wrong, she says it if you tell her off, a waving away of the admonishment. She speaks in complete sentences, a sudden surge in language and she’s our big kid now. We still co-sleep, part necessity, part holding on to the very last vestiges of babyhood that we’ll see. Her body is a warm radiator, her hand on you a comfort in the dark.
The outside world has disappeared, our world is these walls, these girls, a plunge into a twenty four seven that we had never anticipated. The world is broken, tainted and we stand in boxes marked in yellow and black tape while we queue to buy milk. I had my birthday in lock down, all three of my girls had theirs and it was hard, look but don’t touch, presents hung from door handles.
It will pass and in lots of ways, we will miss it. We’ve been very lucky, no one we know has been affected physically and we have all grown closer whilst simultaneously craving time apart. You wonder as you enter lock down, isolation, whatever word has entered our vocabulary and that we never want to hear again, if you will survive it, will your relationship, can you hack all that time, endless time, too much time. And we have. I’m grateful.
There is so much to say but so little. Everyone will write about this, next year there will be a slew of fiction documenting this with a cast of characters that we all recognise from one walk of life or another. There will be textbooks about it, case studies, hideous public enquiries where we talk numbers and forget that each number was a person with a family and a life. I don’t intend to add to that but I do want to document my two year old telling me not to worry. Because she really doesn’t know how much it truly helps.
Fairy Lights and Fear 