'I want to run screaming from my house and burn every soft furnishing'

Lockdown is getting to us all

I have given up pretending everything is ok.

Yesterday my friend sent me a photo of our foggy, deserted beach with the message ‘it matched my mood and camouflaged me from actually having to talk to people.’ 

We are all that foggy beach this week.  

I got up at 4.30am this morning in an effort to have some space from my family. My cat, who has adopted the same clam-like neediness of the rest of my household, followed me around, rubbing his fur against my leg as I made coffee. 'I want to be alone', I told him. And I do.  

I have given up trying to fake myself into positivity this week.  Our walls feel like they are closing in on us, and I want to run screaming from my house and burn every soft furnishing inside it. Despite flinging open the windows as far as they will go for as long as it takes someone to scream ‘I’m cold’ the stale air that comes from four bodies trapped together for too long remains.

Every seat has an indent of a bum and every surface has wires attached to a device, attached to an overloaded plug socket. It feels like that time after Christmas when everyone has spent too much time together and you’re all looking forward to going your separate ways and starting a juice detox.  

I caught a glimpse of myself on a Google Meet the other day and didn’t recognise myself. Wild hair, face puffy from too many pink wafer biscuits and a kind of dead fish expression - it was confronting. I thought to myself, ‘you must do better, Ciara,’ and then I remembered that the only clothes I own now are vaguely luminescent loungewear and jaunty headbands purchased to disguise the badger hair.  

I am angry at shopping online, where I can’t touch or feel or really see cushions that will go together nicely and would make my sitting room feel like a new space. I am cross with the relentless cycle of cooking for my always-hungry family. I am fuming that even though I seem to be constantly cleaning, everything feels filthy.  

My child is reading  Under The Hawthorn Tree with his class. It was the first book that moved me to tears and my entry point to a love of reading. I’m glad he’s reading it, I’m not sure that the story of three orphans Eily, Michael and Peggy fighting for survival and making blood pudding for sustenance is the right note to be hitting now.  

The great thing about being a parent is that you have to compartmentalise your angst. Even when you feel like you are sinking, the children still need to be fed, minded and loved and in the caring for them comes a comfort. It stops me sinking into the depths of the kind of sorrow and despair that would only be remedied by three months in bed with the entire West Wing boxset. 

 So today I will take myself to my foggy, deserted beach and I will shout into the waves. I will shout about how lonely it is without friends, and how awful it is to not be able to hug people, and how angry I am at the shops for not giving me the right cushions. And then I will come back and I will brush my hair before that Google Meet, and I will try to remain calm as I realise I can’t parse a 4th class sentence.  

Armed with the comfort of a pink wafer biscuit, I will discuss how lucky we are with my ten-year-old, whose mind will be blown by the notion that three children would have walked across Ireland on their own, just trying to survive. And I’ll tell him that we are doing ok. And he might just believe me.