Dear You, 

I want to write you a letter for the month of May – an analogue antidote to our intense online digital lives. Of course, for now, you will be reading this on a screen but my hope is, as you’ll see if you read on, that some offline letters will follow between us. For the time being I will write this in the style of a letter, thinking of the quality of one. 

It was my birthday last week and I received two fountain pens and three bottles of ink as presents (my mother and husband both had the same idea), so whilst I am typing this, using squares on a keyboard, I am dreaming of ink on paper. I think what is special about a letter, the real kind that you can hold in your hands, is that it foregrounds my particular moment of writing, and then yours of reading. It grounds me in the physical, sitting now in the living room, the cold metal of the laptop on my legs, while the children watch a Toy Story short on Disney Plus (a new lockdown addition to our lives). It makes explicit the incredible thing that writing does, bridging gaps of time and space, and of people- the gap between you and me. It does physical distancing yet social bridging like nothing else, and I need that kind of bridge right now. 

This period in lockdown has been reminding me of the no-time time between Christmas and New Year. As a child I used to find it strange and fascinating to walk down our street on December the 25th and to know that behind every door a different version of the day was taking place. I knew the insides of some of those houses well enough, but I didn’t know them on Christmas day. It was like the doors that said ‘Staff only’ on them in cafes and shops - suddenly, at that time of year, everyone disappeared behind doors, doors that seemed marked with a backstage, behind-the-scenes sign, the place you can’t see, but you know that stories are unfolding there.

In lockdown this is happening everywhere, for much longer than it does at Christmas time. I think of the twenty-four other families of the children in my son’s school class, how there are twenty-four different versions of this time happening between us- we live close by to one another but do not know how it is for one another in any detail. So, I thought I would write you a letter to tell you, initially, a little about what it is like here, behind our door, and then perhaps you can reply. 

There are five of us behind our door – me, my husband, my mother, my son and my daughter. We are 46, 56, 78, 8 and 3 – ages seem important now. We live in a village in Sussex, in a two bed house, but there is a little studio-shed in the garden that my mother, ‘Granny,’ uses as a bedroom. It is a small house for five people. Usually my husband is not here during the week – he is in London, working. Usually my mother is not here during the weekends – she goes back to my brother’s house in Oxford. But during the lockdown we have all been here all the time, five people, holding, between us, at least twenty-five different roles. Not just the husband, mother, son, sibling, in-law roles – the family ones you might expect to find together in a home – but also the student, teacher, director, facilitator ones. Because usually my husband doesn’t have to be an Artistic Director of a theatre company in the attic, a tiny triangle of space under the roof; I don’t have to facilitate Mothers Who Make sessions in the bedroom; my son doesn’t have to learn his times tables in the kitchen. Usually we go out to be in other buildings for these roles. And these are only the worldly ones. There is a whole raft of other dreaming, feeling roles – the carer, the cleaner, the teaser, the pleaser, the critic, the grump, the clown, the aggressor, the sulker, the button-pressor, the one with the button pressed…..that list goes on to reach many multiplications beyond the times tables that I know. We move through them every day, thousands of roles, ricocheting off each other as we manoeuvre round the kitchen: my daughter running up and down, refusing to get dressed; my son reading comics, strewn across the floor; my mother, holding the pants my daughter won’t put on, trying to keep out of everyone’s way; my husband wanting to make a cup of coffee; me looking for the toothbrushes that I thought I had brought downstairs, but maybe I didn’t. 

Letters can feel confessional and I think I have reached that point in this one. I know the thing that I am meant to do, for everyone’s wellbeing, is to create a clear structure and rhythm for the days, and yet it is the thing with which I struggle most. My son is not asleep till after midnight. This means we get up late – nine, half nine. The first thing he wants to do, as soon as he wakes, is use up his screen-time allowance for the day (currently this means two episodes of My Little Pony). I let him because it means I get my moment of writing time at once, and this helps me accept the cramped-ness of the rest of the day. So by 10.30am, we are undressed and un-breakfasted. Some days we manage to achieve breakfast and clothes just in time for lunch. And then I realise I haven’t done the tooth-brushing….And then there is school work to fit in, and a walk, and the hens need visiting on the allotment, and perhaps some supplies need to be bought or ordered, and several Zoom calls have to happen, and then it is supper, later than it should be, and a bath and I am typing this again, past midnight with the children asleep at last.  

Meanwhile, behind the worldly roles, and the dreaming, feeling roles, pressed tight together in our two bed house, there lie things that are larger than any roles or rooms: the big picture thoughts. The what-will-become-of-us thoughts. The what-will-happen-to-the world questions. What will my children’s lives be like? Will everything get better, worse, or both? Another confession coming up, a confession about prayer. My mother brought us up Catholic – I’m not religious now but I still find myself praying. It feels like writing letters to the air. I still imagine angels, spiritual postmen (but transgender), with huge diamond-shaped wings, like kites, straggling across the night. I pass them messages, requests for health, safety, joy, care – the big things – and they take them up as they fly by.  

And because I cannot hold everything – all the toothbrushes, the meals, pants, melt downs, cups of tea, the roles, the feelings, the big thoughts and prayers – I write, and the writing does some of the holding for me. So, as well as this letter I also wrote you a story, which I will share in a moment. But before that I’d like to write you an invitation too. Usually, I write a question for the month. This time, my question is this: would you like to write me a reply? Would you like to join in a project this blog is the beginning of, called Letters in Lockdown? If so, here’s how…

Write a letter, a poem, a song, a story. Or don’t write, draw. Draw a doodle, a sketch, a cartoon, a painting. Or do both. Or get out the scissors and cut out some paper dolls of all the people in your house. Or get out the glue and make a collage of your lockdown lives. Or make some origami. Write or draw to me and/ or to another mother and maker behind another door somewhere in the world, within this locked down time. Write or draw about how it is behind your door. Write a letter, make an image, such as you would like to receive. Your children can join you in this. They can write their own letter or draw their own drawing. Or you can make one huge messy image altogether. It can be about the big picture, or the tiny details of your days, or both. About the joy, or the fear, or the grumps, or the grief, or the roles, or the toothbrushes, or the angels. Then post it to me. Include a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE). I will put what you sent me into another mother’s empty envelope and send it out to her. I will put another mother’s/ child’s letter/ artwork into your envelope and send it back to you. In this way, you will get a reply. It will be like putting a message in a bottle and not knowing what message will come back, or from whom, but knowing, for sure, that one will. You don’t know exactly where your message will end up. You do not know exactly what you will get back - that’s the game. We will all be writing to each other, and all receiving from each other, lots of lockdown letters and pictures, the kind that involve ink on paper, the kind you can hold, made behind another door, posted through yours. And, with your permission, I will keep a digital record of what you post too, so that one day, maybe, when this is all over and we can walk out into the new world, there will be a book by you and me and many other mothers and makers, called Letters in Lockdown – a record of this time. 

If you want to take part in this art exchange, then email me here and I will send you the address to which to send your letters/ artwork and other details. If you want to take part but you cannot get to a post box, then email me also and I can do the paper and ink and posting for you. I look forward to getting your post. Consider it a commission you are receiving from Mothers Who Make. 

Now, enclosed within this letter, is my story for you. I am sharing it, though I feel shy and nervous about doing so, because I want to show you that it is possible to share different things – not just letters but things that you might not usually put into an envelope and post out to the world. This story is part of a longer series of unpublished flash fiction pieces I am working on called ‘Other Peoples, Other Worlds.’ This one, lockdown-inspired, is called ‘The People Apart.’

But first, let me sign off from letter-writing. Hope to hear back from you. 

With love, and healthful wishes to you and everyone within your home, behind your door.

Matilda xxxxxx

Title Artwork: Lizzy Humber Graphic Recording from MWM International peer support meeting April 2020