Day 1
Stood there in the middle of the living room floor watching Taoiseach Leo Varadkar making an emergency announcement from the US at 11am Irish time – Covid-19 was officially announced as a pandemic the day before…
I felt such a sense of relief as he announced the schools and other educational institutions were closing
‘Thank fuck for that…’ I whispered to myself
Major surgery and major organ failure over the Christmas period has left me a nervous wreck. ~To be honest, I know after speaking to my medical teams that I would struggle to survive if I contracted this new virus.
I had spent the previous day on the phone to Tusla, contacting educational officers and the educational Welfare Officer to get permission to remove the kids from school.
I thought they’d be thrilled. But no. We have several meltdowns and joint choruses of me ruining their lives because they would no longer have social lives. Welcome to my world kid!
Now, I wasn’t the big bad bitch anymore, it was all Leo’s fault now. He ordered it to happen, blame him! The new found smugness didn’t last long. The youngest was already home from school due to a teacher training day – upstairs on the PlayStation, I shouted up the news from the hallway.
‘GREAT!’ I got hurled back sarcastically…
Grand, that wasn’t too bad, I though… envisioning the onslaught of torment when I picked the twelve year old up from school and explained what these new rules meant.
Scrubbing the house down for the umpteenth time, I wondered if I was becoming neurotic… seeing germs everywhere. Wiping everything. Panicking if hands weren’t washed.
The kids had been subjected to almost military drill type cleaning after school, bags in the boot, antibac hands, get home and wash hands properly, hop into shower and throw the clothes worn in school into a wash to be done at 60 degrees to kill as much as possible – wiping their bedroom down every evening with Dettol wipes… they found it amusing for the first three days but I felt the angst creep in on day 4 when one of them sneezed without covering their face and I reacted as if they had slapped me…
Picked the younger lad up from school, I think he thought it would break my resolve to have 15 kids come to the car with him. I could’ve done with a Xanax as I saw his posse approaching me… Oh god… did I have to open the window to engage? Is this what it feels like to be part of a zombie apocalypse? The unwashed approaching to infect…?
‘Alright lads?’ I said as I opened the window, bottle of antibacterial gel in hand – ‘right lads – hands!’ a quarter of a bottle of antibac later – and a telling off from another parent for being ‘excessive, panicking the children’ – I felt safe enough to have the chats.
After a lot of no you can’t come over and the many reasons why, the Mammy guilt chose its moment to weigh in heavily.
‘Look you can hang out with your friends for a couple of hours, but then you’re home and you’re in for the foreseeable, make the most of it’ throwing euros at them all to get a treat to appease my guilt a little more.
We avoided the rules conversation and what this lockdown means. Purely because I didn’t have the head for any further arguing. Tomorrow was another day and I’d face into it then.
I spent the rest of the afternoon disinfection and absolutely fucking bemused by the people who came out in droves panic buying and clearing the supermarket shelves. We were just advised to practice social distancing and in pure panic hundreds have thronged into shops pushing up against each other, breathing on each other for some toilet paper and bread… no doubt we’ll have a spike in cases after this… quickest way to catch a contagious disease lads.
We’re all going to have to find a way to get through it – and hopefully come out the other side as the same dysfunctional family we’ve always been…
Besides I’ve been in isolation for the last 8 months, it’s a new default after training hard the last decade of illness.
Bit of a downer though that I dodged death twice since November and now I’m trying to dodge it again.
If the virus doesn’t get me, the kids could very well be the death of me.
Fuck my life.
ploddingalongquietlycrazy 