28/01/2021
Lockdown baby,
You won’t remember these days, although they will shape your generation. You will grow up learning about the COVID 19 pandemic in school, making friends with children who lost family they never got to meet. You’ll be taught about the death toll, the vaccine, the masks, and about how the entire world closed its doors, and everyone stayed at home, not once, not twice, but over and over again throughout a year, and then a little bit more.
What you cannot learn though is how it felt for the parents of the “lockdown babies.” The dark lows of isolation and fear combined with the simple but powerful pleasure of unbroken skin to skin contact and nesting safe at home. The tears that fell at 6am after a long night of feeding, rocking, feeding, rocking. No support group to go to in the haze of morning - nowhere to go where mama or papa could be handed coffee, a biscuit, and feel the human connection of a hand on shoulder, or a warm, tight hug that says, “It’s ok.”
You won’t remember the hours of Netflix watched with you cuddled in tight and close, cheek to chest, oblivious to the politics right outside the door. You won’t remember the Pizza eaten over your head, delivered at 3pm after a Zoom consultation to check your latch. The bells that rang on Christmas Eve, the smell of banana bread, the daily walks with you tucked into a carrier or pram – brief glimpses of other humans as they passed, heads down, hurrying home, or faces turned smiling – desperate to talk to ANYONE, even if just to say “hello” and bathe in the warmth of a returned smile and eye contact.
Sweet lockdown baby, we can’t lie to you – it wasn’t how the first year together should have been. you were going to swim, learn massage and yoga, and sit in a circle with mama and other parents, all of them bleary eyed yet blissfully in love, as they planned daytime cinema visits, Mummy and baby lunch dates, and hikes along the seafront. The endless hours of solitude were at times unbearable, but what we remember more than the loneliness and uncertainty is you. We remember your warmth and weight – body to body as you settled into your new reality together. The little chirps and squeaks, the wriggles, the gummy first smiles. How wonderful to know nothing but love. Even when the world was upside down.
Thank you, Lockdown baby. You kept us going.
