An Unexpected Twist

She came home from her night away with school, shivering with cold and damp and a hoarse voice, but with lots of stories of the adventures she’d shared with her friends. Meanwhile, L had camped in the garden with a friend, sneaked into the castle at night and then succumbed to Covid, just two days before her scheduled vaccine. Home from school with nothing to do and fully recovered from her school trip, A pulled on her boots, skirted around a visiting grouchy dog and ran across the lawn, footsteps in the damp grass following her, to the bottom of the garden. She spent the morning in the stream, building dams from sticks and mud, hiding out in her woodland lair. This to me is childhood; mud, time and space to let imagination flow, rosy cheeks! Perhaps I am biased, since they are my favourite memories from my childhood. Time spent damning streams, playing in hay barns, crawling through hedgerows, returning home splattered in mud with burrs and twigs snagged in my hair. In contrast to her sister, wrapped in blankets on the couch, A appeared perfectly healthy. Yet I struggled with the decision to allow A to return to school. She was desperate to rejoin her friends and assured me she felt fine. A and I are not required to isolate, but should she return to school? These questions have been swirling around my head in this petri-dish home of ours. Will my vaccine protect me so I can continue to look after my girls? What is the likelihood that A will catch Covid? Will L be ok? Who have we been in contact with? It took a while for the shock of seeing the little positive line pop-up on the covid test to dissipate (so many parallels to pregnancy tests), even though I coolly moved into the next stage of driving to the PCR test site to verify. My car battery flatlined while at the test site, and the army of men in their high-vis uniforms coming to our rescue in our dead steamed-up car, increased the surrealness of our day. I am so thankful Jon is cocooned with his friends and family in Seattle, far away from this. Yet through the anxiety that arrives with Covid and dances around my adult brain, sometimes paralyzing me as I stand there staring absently into the fridge wondering what I should do and why did I open the fridge, I watch L and A shrug their shoulders at it. Now our new norm is established, just for these 10 days of L’s isolation, of L crocheting whilst listening to an audio book, snuggled on the couch, and Amelia back at school after reluctantly enduring a covid test and temperature check every morning. And I am ok with it all now, but I am looking forward more than ever to that first sweet hug with Jon when he arrives home in a couple of weeks.