Parenting During "Il Lockdown"

We were on vacation when I realized that soon nothing would be the same. Naively we had thought a week in the Italian alps in late February would provide the relaxation of any other ski trip. The Coronavirus at the time was still likened to the flu, and the number of cases in Rome, where I live with my husband and our two daughters, remained low and geographically limited. But fear of contagion loomed. Parents at our hotel eyed each other with suspicion, trying unsuccessfully to keep their children from touching the railings, the door handles, the serving spoons at the breakfast buffet. Ours was virtually the only car on the highway when we drove home, stopping as little as possible in cafés that reeked of disinfectant. We changed our 6-month-old baby’s diapers in the car. The next morning a text message confirmed our older daughter’s preschool would close. An hour later, our nanny wrote to say she would no longer come to work. Panic set in. Yes, a potentially lethal pandemic was sweeping across the world. But how was I going to manage to shelter in place in our tiny apartment with a three-year-old and a baby?!?

In Italy, sheltering in place was not a recommendation but a requirement. The Italian government referred to it as “il lockdown,” using the English term, perhaps hoping the word’s association with prison would be lost on non-native speakers. It wasn’t lost on me. I had insisted we rent an apartment near Villa Pamphilij, the largest park in Rome, for a reason. True, it had no air conditioning, we had to store a suitcase behind a chair in the living room, and during my pregnancy, I barely fit in the kitchen. But going outside, being in nature, provided me much-needed calm in Italy’s cacophonous capital, especially after becoming a mother. Afternoons without the playground? No scootering in the park? No more grass where my older daughter, foraging for dandelions, forgot her periodic envy of her new sister, giving me a half-hour of relief? I couldn’t fathom the week ahead, let alone the two months of lockdown that awaited.

My first revelation, which took all of a few minutes, was that to give our new “normal” any sense of normalcy we needed a routine, and it needed to have a hefty dose of what Italians might call fantasia, a mix of creativity and convenience. Play, at times, had to be practical. (Did Maria Montessori live through the Spanish flu? I couldn’t help but wonder.) After breakfast, we started playing “dishes.” I cut a sponge in half and filled a snack box with soapy water so my older daughter could “wash” the spoons while our baby played with the newly cleaned ones. In the meantime, I raced to wash everything else. If I needed more time, we played “drying.” When that was finished, we played “laundry” in a similar fashion. The baby “helped” by pulling wet socks out of the basket; her older sister organized them into pairs and hung them on her little drying rack, a Montessori-inspired present from my mother that quickly became the best gift I’d ever received. Over the next few weeks, I watched in amazement as this game evolved to include my daughter folding her own clothes and, by the time we hit the two-month mark, putting them away in the drawers. In the right place! If her baby sister gleefully reached in to pull out a t-shirt or a pair of pants, she didn’t even bat an eyelash.

Late mornings we spent doing projects. I was well stocked for making crafts after school and on weekends, but I hadn’t anticipated needing enough supplies to occupy us each and every day. The jumbo pad of construction paper I had on hand began to shrink while a host of increasingly elaborate creations began to blanket every bare surface. Over the course of several weeks, collages and paper crowns gave way to an alphabet mural that spanned the girls’ bedroom wall; a cabinet covered on one side with paper vegetables and, on the other, paper fruits, and an empty wine box plastered with paper flowers, each of a different variety. “My favorite is the fried egg flower,” wrote one friend in response to a photo I sent of our paper bouquet.

The dining room door, up to the height my daughter can reach, charts our progress as a family in quarantine. In an effort the first week to make school closure from one day to the next feel less abrupt, my daughter and I replicated—and expanded upon—some of her daily classroom activities. While the baby watched from a “world” of pillows and toys beside the table, which initially I made and, within a few weeks, my older daughter made on her own with visible satisfaction, we drew a series of charts to assess how we were faring. In addition to a handmade calendar to determine the day of the week and the date—an attempt to keep our quarantine haze in a universally recognized structure—we equipped ourselves to evaluate the weather, our moods, the number of people at the table, and if we had slept well or not. Unexpectedly, we proceeded to take stock of these matters every morning for the next two months. The ritual gave us comfort, I think, as we checked in on each other and acknowledged we were healthy. While it dipped every once in a while into “jealous”—sisterhood remains a relatively new reality for my daughter—and “frustrated”—a box we all found ourselves in on more than one occasion—the marker on the mood chart most often stayed in the “happy” box. Now that Italy has begun to ease its restrictions, the marker in my memory of our two months in lockdown will stay in that box forever.

Lindsay Harris is an art historian, writer, and mother who lives with her family in Rome. She has published articles and organized exhibitions on the history of photography and urbanism in Italy, including, most recently, "Matera Imagined: Photography and a Southern Italian Town."