The last few weeks have been weeks of big feelings and deep thoughts. Just in time for my 29th birthday, Nicola Sturgeon announced that we would be moving to 'Phase 1' of the path out of lockdown, meaning we could meet one other household in any outside space, including our gardens. A dear friend came to visit, and it felt like getting drunk: just being able to sit two metres from another person and to talk at length, without computer screens in between. It made me realise that the substitutes we had come to rely on during lockdown were paltry things indeed.
This easing of restrictions has also made me very aware of what my daughter has missed. When lockdown began, she was 9 months old, had just started to crawl, and was only occasionally interested in the presence of other children. Now she is almost one, almost walking, and she is ready to play. She has spent a quarter of her life in lockdown.
She is, even under 'ordinary' lockdown circumstances, a happy, playful child, but I have noticed over the past week or so how much happier she is around other people. She will happily put up with her parents talking at length with another adult if that adult is a real body a few metres away, whilst her patience for video chats is much more limited. During a visit to friends with a toddler some nine months older than her, she got sprayed in the face with a water sprinkler, and cried. I bundled her up and, a contrary parent, laughed. This was the first time in her life that playing with a peer had turned to tears - that there had even been the opportunity for this to occur.
I worry more about the impact of lockdown on her now that it is easing. I worry what I am teaching her when I grab her, mid-flight, as she crawls towards a visiting adult. When physical transgressions occur - we are human, and she is a baby - and she touches a person who is neither me nor her father, the guilt I feel for 'breaking the rules' is matched by the assuagement of the guilt I feel that social distancing might inadvertantly be teaching her to avoid others, to never share.
And yet, at the same time as we have been delighting in human company, just anger and deep-welled grief have also been sweeping the globe. To my shame, I have never before thought as deeply about racism as I have over the past days. I think once again of teaching my daughter. Of the fact that as a white mother of a white baby I have the privilege of never having to teach her how to avoid being killed or harmed for the colour of her skin. That I have the responsibility of teaching her to be aware of her privilege, and to use it with the aim that, perhaps, her children won't have that privilege. I look at her toys, her books. I think about how ignorant I am about how even to start, and know that I have a lot to learn.
