Local parent, researcher and writer, Maddie Wallace, continues her daily diary describing the experience first, of self-isolating, and now of being in lockdown with her children in Southsea. It’s Day 45, and Maddie shares an unflinchingly honest account of a day that really doesn’t feel OK – and that’s OK.
I wrote one thousand words about Wednesday, but I deleted them all.
It was one of those days where even though you have amazing friends who support you, and the kids are relatively well behaved, and the dog doesn’t complain even though you didn’t have time to walk her, and the cat behaves impeccably, you still feel crap and everything feels horrible. I wrote a thousand words and tried to focus on the positive things that happened, but it would be a lie.
It was a piece of crap day and that’s OK. It’s OK to not be sunshine and rainbows every day. It’s OK to just want to stop the world sometimes. It’s OK to wallow in self-loathing for a bit, as long as you can drag your way back out of it again. It’s OK to give your kids pizza for tea and have a ready meal yourself because you don’t have the energy to cook from scratch. It’s OK to need a break and be annoyed that you can’t get one. It’s OK.
Sometimes I need to remind myself of that. I didn’t find myself in a good place and nothing I tried made it any better. In fact, trying to carry on as normal made it worse.
I’m grateful for my children, my silly pets, my family and my fantastic friends, who essentially kept me afloat all day. But I miss my parents, I miss my friends, I’m sick of being anxious about normal things like going to the supermarket, I wish I could magic my stress away, I don’t want to hear about bloody Boris Johnson’s baby, I hate the sodding rain and this virus is doing my head in.
I’m livid that our government ignored the information coming out of China from the end of January until the middle of March. I’m so angry that NHS staff and care workers don’t have the protective equipment they need. I hate the endless propaganda at the daily briefing. I want to see our leaders standing up there and saying, ‘We’re sorry, we’ve made mistakes, too many of your loved ones have died and that’s on us, we’ve let people down and we’re doing our best to put it right’. I want them to act like decent human beings instead of robotic and polished bullshitters.
I want better for my children and your children. I want better for our elderly and our vulnerable. I want more for our country than this endless evocation of a national myth that we’re somehow better than everyone else because people survived the Blitz eighty years ago. I want the planet to stop being abused and resources to be properly shared. I want things to change and some days it really gets me down that people just blindly accept what they’re told by other people who care more about money than they do about human beings.
That’s Wednesday in a nutshell. I hope Thursday is better, but it might not be. And that’s OK too.
Maddie is sharing her lockdown experiences every day on S&C – you can find each day’s diary and all of Maddie’s previous articles for S&C here.
