Tuesday marks 1 year since the UK went into its first lockdown on the 23rd March 2020. For me, lockdown actually began a couple of weeks earlier when the government announced that pregnant women were included in the high-risk category. Then heavily pregnant I was granted permission to wfh (work from home) from my company, and my husband told me I needed to stop going to the local shop and that he would buy whatever items we needed on his way home.
I was happy to work from home but slightly annoyed that I had just paid my monthly rail card and thought of the money I could have saved. I thought Hasani was being a bit dramatic with me not going to the shop to get my then much needed chocolate digestives, but since I was also carrying his child I decided it was not a battle that needed to be fought and quietly surrendered. I remember chatting with his older sister and saying that he was basically losing it because around this time he was also insisting we do a huge online shop of tins of corned beef, a Trinidadian hard times staple, rice, flour, and other non-perishables. He kept telling me we had to prepare for the shop shelves being emptied and I repeatedly told him “Hasani we basically live next door to a Sainsbury’s and we are in London for goodness sake! This is never going to happen!” To my utter amazement Hasani’s predictions came to pass just a couple of weeks later. When he sent me the picture of empty shelves from Sainsbury it was one of the few times in our marriage that I have had to admit defeat.
My mum also flew in a couple of days before we went into lockdown to be with me for Alba’s birth. I remember all three of us; Hasani, mum and me, looking at the television in amazement as Boris Johnson declared a nationwide lockdown. Trinidad closed its borders a few days later and we bunkered down to lockdown life. I once again was wrong as I declared to my mum to comfort her, though really I was comforting myself, “I’m sure by May this will all be over.”
I started my mat leave in the beginning of April, and the lockdown walks began. If you read my blog regularly, you would know that Alba took her leisurely time to come and had to be evicted at 42 weeks and 1 day. However, back then I was convinced I would have a “regular” birth and the midwives kept telling me to walk to get labour started. For 6 weeks straight my mum and I walked around 7km every day and examined my belly to see if “it dropped yet”. My days started with a half an hour workout in my living room, a long walk with my mum, an afternoon nap in case I went into labour that evening, and nighttime tears that another day had passed without me going into labour. The next morning, like Sisyphus I would rise to do the same thing all over again carrying my belly rather than the boulder.
Fast forward to post Alba’s eviction and summertime. It was a wonderful summer. I had my baby, I had my mum and husband and their support, the weather was resplendent, and I was babymooning. Summer was marked by picnics in the park and walks with my baby tied to me with some cloth contraption that I thankfully later replaced with one that had buckles and straps. Alba was a beautiful newborn, she would just wake up to feed and fall back asleep, the only slight hiccup was she absolutely detested her crib and Hasani was petrified of SIDS (sudden infant death), so he refused to have her swaddled. It didn’t matter to me though, as a breastfeeding mum I was happy to co-sleep and life was good.
Autumn rolled in with heavy clouds, grey skies, damp weather and sleep regressions. By now my mum had returned to our sunny Caribbean and Hasani and I were adapting to life as a little family. This period was a bit foggy for me, I felt lonely with mum no longer here to chat with, Alba beginning her battle against my attempts to get her to sleep, and Hasani being very busy with work. Every morning I would repeat to myself “get up, dress up, show up” as I rolled out of bed to repeat my daily cycle of working out, taking care of Alba, making calls to family, and sending whatsapp messages to friends on a few hours of sleep.
As Christmas approached, I was hit with a new zeal of enthusiasm. By now we had grudgingly accepted that the much anticipated baby’s first Christmas in Trinidad was not going to happen and we would have to make the best of London. We excitedly ordered a real Christmas tree, and bought some decorations for the flat, and groceries. Christmas lasted from mid-November till mid-January in our house. We ate, we drank, we dressed Alba up for calls and we chatted over home-made hot chocolate. Alba continued her sleep strike and both of us had midnight play dates in the living room and waking up Hasani every time I heard what I thought to be a squeak after reading countless articles on the thriving rat and mice populations in lockdown and how they were invading houses.
In January I woke up one day fed up of it all; fed up of lockdown, fed up of winter, fed up of being indoors all the time. I realised that I had spent the year before mothering, the year before that being pregnant and the year before that planning to get pregnant. I started panicking that I was losing my identity and decided to reconnect with my inner self. My dad always tells this story of me as a little girl going on a hike with my family and pulling out my journal on the mountain top to write. In my head I thought this last year was definitely an uphill climb and the time had come to pull out my journal and begin writing and so I did the modern day equivalent, I started blogging. These past three months have been spent reading, blogging, and journaling.
I don’t know what this next year will bring, whether warmer weather and sunny days will ever come to London, whether we will go home for Christmas, whether Alba will finally start sleeping, whether return to work and Alba in nursery will be a smooth transition…these are all questions that occupy my thoughts at night. What I do know is that I have grown stronger as a person and our little family has become a tight little unit ready to battle whatever is thrown our way, and my wider family has been my constant support through it all despite the ocean in between us. To use Albert Camus’ words “In the midst of winter I found there was within me an invincible summer”.
