Newsletter for Childless Parents, Summer 2020

Newsletter for Childless Parents | www.tcf.org.uk 10 It’s funny how people adopt phrases as if they are new and original isn’t it. People keep talking about the New Normal as if it is an original concept. They’ve hi-jacked our vocabulary! And our feelings! Have you noticed the parallels between the situation that the world is living in currently, and the world that you and I have been occupying for some time? Grief? One event, accident, incident, call it what you will, has sent ripples to every corner of the world. We’ve been there, done it and got the medal. The rest of the world is just playing catch up in my view. We keep asking for answers. Why? Whose fault is it that this happened? Could it have been prevented? How will we survive something so huge? Will we heal? Familiar phrases right? But ultimately the answers to those questions are elusive and we have no clarity. We just know that we are here and we have to find a way to deal with it and survive. So how are we coping? Generally, collectively, how is the world dealing with the normal that is for them now apparently so ‘new’? Can we, as bereaved parents draw on our own experiences to show the non-bereaved how to adapt? Listen. I know that everybody’s lockdown experience is different. Like grief. I also know that everyone is handling this in their own way. Like grief. It’s a subjective matter and it really depends on who we were before. What our life experience was, who is in our support team, our coping strategies and a host of other factors. Like grief. And it’s not rigid is it? It’s fluid and varied. One minute you are full of beans and clearing out that cupboard, wondering why you still have baking powder from 2012, then you find yourself sitting staring at that baking powder and realising that this silly little mundane item that you have been staring at for the last 30 minutes, was in the house “before”. The thought that I had probably had this out when James and I were making some silly cake together throws me into another dimension and suddenly this inanimate and out-of- date object becomes a precious relic from a beautiful past. The old normal. There was nothing wrong with the old normal. Happy times lived in colour and when this silly little item should have been thrown in the bin long since, but now finds its way wiped down and put neatly back in the newly lined cupboard because it represents a different time. The old normal which required no newness and no updating. The New Normal. Where have we heard that before?