Dear Yuri,
I have to pick my way carefully as every floor in the house is covered with toys and discarded craft projects, the kitchen and bathroom need a good scrub. We are drowning in clutter but by the end of each day, after two little heads are resting on pillows, I sit and luxuriate in the stillness of not having to fetch a drink or find a stuffed bunny and think we made it to the end of another day and somehow we are incredibly, stupidly happy.
My 4 year old stopped asking on day 3 what the plans are today. She has the young child’s gift of being able to accept and adjust without worrying about what could be. We are immensely fortunate; it turns out our set up is pretty ideally suited to lockdown. We have toys, lots of space, enough food, telly (please God let nothing happen to the telly or the internet), jobs that we can do from home, none of our loved ones are ill, we can stroll up a hill or down to the beach, we have each other, and it turns out we don’t need much else.
As always, the kids teach us more about life than we can teach them and currently they are providing a masterclass in how to just ‘be’. Stripped of the need to go places and do stuff at first just existing from morning to afternoon to evening felt uncomfortable and strange but we are slowly starting to accept this awful situation as the most generous gift of time with these two little people while we are still their whole world.