Some weekends the phone does not ring. Zoey is busy, or she cannot call, and before I have even said anything Martin will ask, \u201cHas Zoey not called?\u201d By now, her phone calls have become such a normal part of our lives that their absence is noticeable. Most days when she is staying with her father, she calls me. Sometimes there is a story. Sometimes there is almost nothing to say. Sometimes it is just a few minutes about school, something funny, something annoying or what she had for dinner. Nothing remarkable, and yet I can no longer imagine those days without hearing her voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was not always like that. When I first became ill, I felt guilty about those calls. Zoey had already lost so much because of my illness. Plans changed, holidays changed, our home changed, and the mother she had known suddenly had far less energy and could no longer do many of the things she used to do. The last thing I wanted was for my child to feel responsible for checking whether I was okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whenever she called, part of me wondered why. Did she simply want to talk to her mum, or had she started worrying about me? Was this another thing Long Covid had quietly placed on her shoulders? She was a child. She should not have had to think about whether I had slept, whether I could breathe properly that day, whether I was in bed again, or whether my body had crashed after doing something that once would have been completely ordinary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over time, though, the calls changed meaning for me. Or perhaps I finally began to understand what they had been all along. Zoey was not calling because I had turned her into my carer. She was calling because this had become one of the ways we stayed close when we were in different places. It was not always about how ill I was. Often it was not about illness at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She also learned something that many adults still struggle to understand: my brain does not always work properly anymore. There are moments when she asks me something simple and I give an answer that has almost nothing to do with the question. Words disappear. Information gets stuck somewhere between hearing and answering. Sometimes I know I am saying the wrong thing and still cannot reach the right answer quickly enough. Other times I only realise afterwards that the conversation went completely differently in my head than it did in hers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We still laugh about some of the things my brain has produced. Once I asked her, completely seriously, \u201cCan you put the microwave in the fridge?\u201d What I meant was: can you put the leftovers in the fridge. Somewhere between thought and speech, my brain had simply swapped one thing for another. Zoey knew what I meant. We laughed about it then, and we still laugh about it now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She might look at me as if she has just seen water catch fire, repeat herself or explain something again. Sometimes she laughs with me when my brain produces something particularly strange, but she never makes me feel stupid for it. She seems to know the difference between me not listening and my brain simply failing to connect the pieces. There is a gentleness in that which I do not take for granted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She has also learned when not to call. After a broken night, she knows we may be asleep during the day. If we have spent a night in hospital, she does not ring early because she knows we might finally be resting. She takes those things into account without needing a long explanation. She knows when contact is comforting, but also when silence can be a form of care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That may be the part I understand differently now. In the beginning, I was afraid that illness had forced her to care for me. Now I see that caring about someone and being responsible for them are not the same thing. Zoey is still my daughter. I am still her mother. The direction of that relationship has not disappeared because she sometimes asks whether I am okay or adjusts the moment she calls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Long Covid has changed almost every practical part of motherhood for me. There are things I cannot do with her, places I cannot always go and moments when my body decides what our day will look like before either of us gets a say. But motherhood is not only found in what we do together. Sometimes it is in listening to her complain about something small. Sometimes it is in hearing the excitement in her voice before she has even finished the first sentence. Sometimes it is in trying to follow a story with a brain that is several seconds behind and knowing that she will wait for me to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Recently I saw a video online about a mother who called or messaged her daughter every day. Eventually the daughter told her it was too much. She felt suffocated and asked her mother to stop. So the mother stopped. Later something happened at the daughter\u2019s work and, almost instinctively, she looked for the contact she had always known would be there. When she realised the messages had stopped, she asked her mother why. Her mother reminded her that she had only done what she had been asked to do. In the end, the daughter asked her to start again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I kept thinking about that video long after I had watched it. Not because our story is the same, but because I recognised something in it. The things we repeat every day can become so ordinary that we stop noticing what they mean. A message. A call. A familiar name appearing on a screen. We often only understand the space something occupies in our lives when, for a moment, it is missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I used to worry every time Zoey called that my illness had taken another small piece of her childhood. Now, when the phone rings and I see her name, I no longer think first about what Long Covid has taken. I think about what has remained. She tells me about her world and, for those few minutes, I am invited into it. I listen as well as my brain allows. Sometimes I follow every word. Sometimes my brain gets tangled and gives me something completely different, like the day the leftovers somehow became the microwave. She knows both versions of me by now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One day these daily calls will probably become less frequent. Her life will get busier. There will be studies, work, friends, travel, relationships and all the things I want her life to grow into. I do not want her to feel she has to call me every day forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But for now, most days, my phone rings, and if it does not, someone usually notices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some weekends the phone does not ring. Zoey is busy, or she cannot call, and before I have even said anything Martin will ask, \u201cHas Zoey not called?\u201d By now, her phone calls have become such a normal part of our lives that their absence is noticeable. Most days when she is staying with her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":910,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daphnemutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daphnemutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daphnemutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daphnemutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daphnemutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=909"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.daphnemutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":911,"href":"https:\/\/www.daphnemutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions\/911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daphnemutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daphnemutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daphnemutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daphnemutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}