Do our children deserve an apology for Covid lockdowns?

In this work of fiction, a Baby Boomer pens a heartfelt apology to her daughter and grandchildren. Should she – and her generation – have done more to curb Victoria’s lengthy lockdowns?

A quiet and deserted Collins St during the coronavirus pandemic.

Five years ago, Melbourne was in the grip of the first of several long lockdowns. A working mother and her family endured restrictions on their freedom that persisted into 2021. Like all parents of young children and teenagers, she worried about how continued school closures would affect their education, social lives and mental health. She still wonders. As the fifth anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic approached, she wrote a fictional short story in the form of a letter from a stranger to the next generation, revisiting life in the world’s most locked-down city.

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To my dear daughter and to your children (my darling grand­children),

This letter is long overdue. Please excuse the delay. I have just been so busy with the renovations and your father’s back has been flaring up. It’s been on my mind for a long time that I ought to write and thank you for everything that you and the kids did for me during the pandemic, especially in 2021. You put your life on hold and stayed at home for the better part of two years for me and your father, our friends and all the baby boomers. I know an apology from me does not undo the damage done to you and our grandchildren. I know that we – the grandparents of Melbourne – are not solely responsible for the events that disrupted your lives and your children’s lives so catastrophically. There were many forces at play and many who should bear responsibility. But it’s time my generation took some accountability for the part we played, and for what we didn’t say.

I am sorry. And I see now.

I know that under the pressure of living under a form of house arrest, your marriage crumbled and your career stalled. I know that you have already forgiven me for the direct impact on you. You have deftly soothed me and avoided blame with kind phrases like “We probably would have broken up eventually”. You have deployed self-deprecating language about the stasis your career trajectory suffered.

But I also know that despite you bearing what happened to you with such stoicism, you may never forgive me for what happened to your children.

Your oldest son started university in 2020, doing his lectures and tutorials online. He didn’t meet many of his fellow students until he was nearly in third year, and as a result he has made few friends in his course. I know the exchange program that was to occupy the second year of his degree was cancelled. I know that the internships didn’t happen and he still hasn’t found work in his chosen field. You told me about the girl he had just started dating in 2020 who by early 2021 (when tired of her inhospitable inner city share-house) moved back to the country to live with her parents. That rupture, the distance and the stress of it all meant the ­relationship faltered, failed and ended. He is now 25 – and hasn’t met anyone special since.

I know that your daughter, beautiful middle child, suffered the most. During our regular FaceTime sessions I watched her lose so much weight that she seemed to be disappearing in front of my eyes. I saw her dead, blank stare each time we spoke. I sometimes joked that she looked like she was being held hostage. Which, of course, she was.

   

I know she missed out on sleepovers, trips to the cinema, illicit smoking and drinking in the park. Her closest friendships were mothballed while she lived her life online, doom scrolling in a darkened room, anxiety swirling around her. I know that you have spared me the most florid details of the self-harm events that followed, and the white-knuckled six-month wait to get her into see a psychologist in an effort to keep her alive. I heard the pain in your voice when talking of masked trips to the emergency department and the pernicious, treatment-resistant nature of her terrible anxiety and depression. I know you still grieve for her life interrupted, and her life thrown off course.

I know your youngest (the late surprise baby boy, arriving to delight us all, eight years after your daughter) may never make up the lost ground in his educational attainment. The critical years of his primary schooling were so fractured that he is now testing as 18 months behind in literacy and as all but unsalvageable in maths. I know he suffers from a crippling screen addiction fuelled by all those lonely days when he was “home schooled”. Home schooled by whom (I dared not ask at the time) given both his parents were working 12-hour days online? And I know your friends and colleagues suffered too. I heard your voice break when you told me about your friend at work, a woman in her late 30s who missed three critical IVF ­cycles during 2021, and now will never have a child. You were angry when you told me about your best friend, a man who was working in the country when one of the long lockdowns began. He missed months of Family Court-ordered ­access with his teenage daughter. Now their ­relationship is distant and strained and may never return to how it was, or could have been.

I saw the kids’ dad, (the lovely gentle man who we now all blithely call “your ex”) sitting with his head in his hands bedside you while you told me over FaceTime about his sister’s breast cancer diagnosis. The early warning signs missed due to several skipped GP appointments during long lockdowns; tests not ordered; all caught too late. And I know that the kids’ favourite aunt is now in palliative care, when she may not be had the cancer been picked up earlier.

I know that the impact for someone in their 70s staying at home is nothing like your kids missing their one shot at being and feeling every minute of being aged 19, 16 or 8.

I knew it then, and I know it now. But this is the first time I have told you that I know it.

In 2020, the first year, things were so frightening and charged. No cure; no vaccines. The footage from Italy of corpses overflowing in ­refrigerated vans; the mass graves and field hospitals in New York City. In Melbourne, nursing homes were receiving a grim parade of hearses in circular driveways. I lost friends and acquaintances. The fear was visceral, logical – and justified.

So I comfort myself that it’s very likely that you don’t even begrudge me and my cohort the deprivations of that first year. Indeed, I am sure that you believe the bargain and the balance struck in 2020 was essential and reasonable to keep everyone safe and to flatten that curve. But then came 2021, the second year. A miracle of sorts: a viable vaccine already being rolled out. Yet you (and everyone in Melbourne, who suffered the longest, harshest lockdowns) continued to anxiously calculate the 5km radius around your house, inside which you were permitted to walk. You and your generation dropped off home-baked cakes to our doorsteps, touched our palms through nursing home windows, had the children send us letters with drawings covered in glue and glitter, and took our FaceTime calls when we were bored and lonely. You and your younger colleagues and friends nursed us, vaccinated us, stocked the shop shelves, drove the garbage trucks and kept the white-collar economy moving in endless Teams meetings. You kept your children home from school and cancelled every­thing. You ran businesses from kitchen ­tables and turned off the lights on your own lives. And you did it all for us.

   

Of course, the policies that protected us were also the popular view, led by all governments and nowhere more strictly than in Melbourne. We stayed silent along with much of the media and Opposition. The few who spoke out seeking to strike a new balance in favour of children in the second year of the pandemic were silenced or ignored. Libby (you remember her, the psychologist in my book club) says Generation X has actually internalised our generation’s refusal to cede power to them as a form of anxious insecurity. Perhaps that partly explains why our grandchildren’s wellbeing ended up being subjugated to the populist position in 2021. I am not sure. Maybe that was part of it. Or maybe it is always hard to challenge the popular view and the loudest voices.

Because I knew by 2021 that the bargain we had struck had become untenable for you and your kids, and all of your contemporaries and their children. We pretended we were all in it together. But the reality is, you were in it for us.

When the vaccines were rolled out in 2021, I knew it was time to say something while ­another year of your life was reduced to the four walls of a home inside which your family was crumbling.

We watched you for a second year making work phone calls from inside a wardrobe while filling a rubbish bin with the ­shredded paper proof of cancelled holidays, school camps and concerts and birthday parties ruined. As that second year unspooled, we should have said that we would be the only ones to stay home and curtail our lives, while you and the children kept living a full life outside.

We should have agitated for a new bargain. We should have insisted that schools, universities and training colleges reopen and demanded that working in offices, shops and factories resume. We should have petitioned our governments to allow you to send your kids back to school, and out onto the playing fields, and back to the piano recital stage. We should have shouted from the rooftops that nothing was more important than those kids experiencing their first loves, their first breakups, the joy of playing music with friends, the silliness of drinking together and laughing, going to parties and dancing til late, then walking through the dark streets with a friend to find a kebab.

   

We should have championed the importance of their social and romantic lives; the singing of the club song with the team after a noble defeat in the mud; being presented with the ­debating or netball trophy at a school assembly while their mates cheered; going for a swim with friends and talking for hours afterwards, wrapped in towels while licking ice cream running down sandy arms.

We baby boomers knew that by staying ­silent and not speaking out as a group (one with immense power in our society) and by not advocating a change in direction, we were depriving our grandchildren of the milestones they were entitled to expect to experience, enjoy and endure on their way to adulthood.

But we said nothing. Instead we sat silently in our sprawling homes, or retreated down the coast to our comfortable beach houses. We sat on our superannuation, our pensions, our share portfolios. We had it all, and we had done it all. So to stay at home in 2021 did not require us to miss out on as much as was being demanded of you; you who had not yet enjoyed the things that we already have.

And here’s the thing. We knew the bargain would never be recalibrated unless we said something. We knew it because we helped shape you and your self-effacing ways. We knew that you would never ever ask this for yourselves. We knew that you are used to the permanency of our power. You have seen me and your father refuse to retire, decline to downsize, and repel all attempts to prise open our death grip on our investment properties and franking credits.

So we were comfortable in the knowledge that you would not refuse to sacrifice yourselves for us this time. That if we didn’t insist on releasing you, you would never do it for yourselves. So, we did nothing. Instead, we watched you fall into line, and corral and cajole your children into line as well.

My friends and I could have used our power to command an audience. We are used to being listened to. We are the former captains of industry turned well-paid consultants; we are the retired directors of the boards; the esteemed patrons; the Emeriti; the Immediate Past so-and-sos. We should have penned our own petitions to government – or at least signed those that others wrote. We should have inundated talkback radio with our howls of protest on your behalf. Instead, we continued to rely on your quiet acceptance of our history of ­demanding all of the things, all of the time.

And then when it was over, I should have rung my grandchildren and said encouragingly: “Sweetheart, it’s over! You and your Mum and Dad did a beautiful thing for us. We love you for it. We know it’s hard after so long but it’s time. Throw back the covers, get out of bed, turn on the light. The sun might hurt your eyes a bit at first. You might get the wobbles. It will probably feel a bit scary for a while. But you go now; you get on with life. Don’t think about us. We will be fine. Run, go, play, laugh. Live!”

It’s too late now to reverse the damage done. But now I will at least say what I should have said back then: “Thank you, my dear children, and thank you to your children too. Thank you all for the sacrifices you made during 2021. Thank you for putting us before yourselves – and your own kids. I am sorry for not releasing you sooner from the pact you made to keep us safe at the expense of your precious children.”

Said no boomer, ever.

Rachel Doyle is a Melbourne barrister.