Next to my desk there is a drawing pinned to my corkboard. It shows me and my youngest daughter lying down together, both of us smiling into space, my arm swung around the back of her head, seemingly in the middle of telling her a story. She gave it to me a couple of years ago because that is when she is happiest: at the end of the day, our limbs entwined, together alone in her small bed.
Since Ontario went back into lockdown a month ago, she is once again doing online school from her bedroom, and during breaks will frequently drift down the hall to my home office. The other day she wandered in and caught me staring at her drawing.
She asked: “Do you want me to draw it again?”
“Why? It’s perfect.”
“It’s weird. I can do it better now.”
“It’s true, you are a better artist now,” I replied. “But I love this picture.”
I explained how I loved the details of me in my day clothes and her in pyjamas, that I loved her grin and wide-open eyes (which as usual were clearly not ready for sleep), and most of all, I loved the total contentment in her face.
“That’s really hard to do,” I said. “Depicting joy is not easy. You did it perfectly.”
She went back to her online class and I got distracted by work, emails, and endless video calls. At the end of the day, as I closed my laptop, I noticed a drawing strewn on the floor. It was her attempt at recreating the old picture.
I stared at it for a couple of minutes. Then I called her into my room.
I asked her, tenderly: “What did you mean by that?”
In the new drawing the colour was gone and the lines careless, the joy in her grin, feigned. In fact, she abandoned the drawing altogether, crossing it out and writing in big letters: “I WANT MY OLD LIFE BACK.”
Quite the words to read when they come from a child in grade three.
I asked her again: “What did you mean?”
“Before Covid,” she said, casting her eyes downward.
I looked at the picture again and remembered that when Covid hit, she began talking about dying and death. What happens when you die? Why do we have to die? I don’t want to die. Not once or twice, but every night. Then she could no longer sleep through the night. Somewhere between 3 and 4 a.m., like clockwork, she would come to my bedside. She’s a restless sleeper—not good for a wife who is a nurse and health clinic director during a pandemic—and so I would go to her narrow bed and lay with her until morning, delirious from my sleepless night. Eventually, I could no longer function and ended up putting her in the same room as her older sister, hoping to mitigate the midnight terrors. Still, in the morning, I often saw she had pushed her bed flush against her sister’s. Sometimes I saw both pillows in the same single bed.
She was seven years old when the pandemic and lockdowns began. She is now nine. On a percentage basis, she has spent about 12 percent of her childhood in pandemic isolation. Time is relative. Scaled to my life span, that would feel like nearly six years to my 46-year-old mind. I try to imagine six years without touching friends and family, and I realize as long as this has felt for me, for her it must feel an eternity.
The pandemic is hard on the young, for a portion of childhood has been lost.
It is as though a fog had swept over the earth, hiding the playgrounds where they used to roam and the schools where they used to gather; a dense mist which has also drifted into our homes, darkening everyday life and blurring the pages of the fairy tales by which they used to escape. It is no wonder bedtime is where she began to confront her mortality. All she could see was the fog of this pandemic, a fog which has lingered for far too long.
As the sun brightens and more get vaccinated, soon it will be burned away. Playgrounds will once again overflow, school halls will be filled with hugs and laughter, and life at home won’t feel so damn oppressive. Kids will start to feel like kids again.
For now, she is tired of it all. And so that night I laid in her bed to help her sleep, feeling her heavy breath against my chest, with the shadows drawn across our faces. I told her childhood will be returned, for it was lost, not gone, and I will once again see the perfect grin she drew on my heart.
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I found this very moving that you have this deep connection with your little girl. Sometimes parents are too busy to notice such important issues. Really well written.
Thanks for writing this Lance. Your daughter speaks for many of us.... reading your piece was helpful.