Remote working: the distance is longer if you're childless

Yet another lockdown. You are alone. You've been home for days. You go out to take a breath of fresh air and buy some food. But more than anything else, you go out to see people not on your PC screen, and to talk to someone, if you're lucky. You're working hard to keep away the destructive and painful thoughts about your fate that brought you here, in the silent world of childless people. 

- While your colleagues in Zoom complain about their kids they can't properly handle.

- While your colleagues’ children are there playing in the background of the PC screen during online meetings.

- While the children of all the neighbours are on home schooling, and you can hear them screaming and laughing, -

You are always there: you're one in five women without children.

 

Isolation makes you live over your story of loneliness and grief. As often happens, it is a really painful story that you live with every day and that you cannot share with anyone, or can just share with a few who sometimes, not knowing how to react, drop rude comments like: “everything happens for a reason”, “the children are a nightmare”, or “you're lucky, you can travel and sleep as much as you want”.

Motherhood that hasn’t happened. An unrecognized pain, the one you are not entitled to, as you cannot lose something you never had. You are not allowed to talk about it in our grief-phobic society that expects you to get over it as quickly as possible. But you know it will never go away, as there are things that just cannot be fixed.

Now in the silence of your empty house, this loss of yours is overwhelming, and it makes you feel even more alone, useless and sad. And the depression is here, behind the door: you no longer live, you no longer work, you are nobody.