Love under lockdown

Love is attention, however inventive we have to be with that now.

At the end of our lives the question should be not what we have done, but how well we have loved. Do you fall short? I do, in some respects; perhaps we all do. Loving well is a challenge that takes on a particular urgency during these jittery times, and it feels like it has little to do with desire right now; more so with love as the gift of attention. Now is not the time for caution with love, not the time to hesitate. It’s a time more than ever to give, to balm, to notice.

But it feels hard, sometimes now, to love attentively. I have days, many days – long weeks into this lockdown norm – where my world is fraying. Where it feels like the centre cannot hold. I find myself turning into the mother I shed long ago, the one trying to keep everything tightly under control; the shouty one, despairing one, frustrated one. Over two decades of mothering it’s been a long learning process of letting go, of loosening. But now this. Mothering in extraordinary times, under explosive new pressures, with a solitary working-from-home routine kneecapped by a swirl of demanding children who are constantly underfoot.

And in the process the woman who scares me is sneaking back, and I have to make a conscious effort to keep her down. To love well. Because to do it well as a parent means loving calmly even as you’re exhausted, bewildered, overwhelmed. When you’re screaming inside to make them all go away, to let you work in peace, please; to stop asking you questions, stop showing you all the school work and stop asking “what day is it?” and “what’s for lunch?” in an endless groundhog day of mother-love in the time of lockdown.

So, the tongue is bitten. Because the kids need calm more than ever right now, evenness and consistency and buoyancy. Especially our younger ones. Mine don’t need to see me screaming inside at times to just get away from them all; to write, and think, and uncurl in solitude. That’s always been my anchor to serenity. As a writer, an alone pregnant with possibility is the longed-for state. It’s impossible now.

But the kids need an enveloping sense of security to get them through this and I know they look to their parents for this, so I love as evenly as I can. And I know we will one day surface into a fresh world, closer than ever, and that is a good thing. As a family, this lockdown has changed us, for the better.

What I’ve found most moving during this time: public displays of love. From partners waiting for the return home from hospital, from elderly parents who can’t be visited anymore, from grandkids who can only be with grandpa from a distance; divided by a window or a suburban lawn. Love is attention, however inventive we have to be with that now. But we are, gloriously.

Love in these confronting times is expressed through hard work for another. It is not passive or waiting, it is tender and thoughtful and surprising and generous. Love has never felt more selfless. Look at the example of our health workers and their sacrifices; look at all of those on the frontline, doing their jobs. For us.

During this time of enforced stillness, let’s spend this time loving well. Better. Perhaps this is a vast corrective; to love more attentively, to notice. I dream of surfacing, but into what changed world? A better one I’m sure. “We loved with a love that was more than love,” Edgar Allan Poe once wrote. It feels like that now, with this love that is so much more. It is crutch, support, medicine, balm; it is charged in these plague times and I, for one, am heeding the lessons of it. Love is the most restorative thing we have right now and I’m vowing more than ever to return the generosity, and love well, love better.