What Lockdown Taught Me About My Own Childlessness
A child therapist reflects on the voids left by illness and loss
Driving through the gate of my dad’s house in March of last year, I saw an invisible door close behind me. I pulled up the handbrake and exhaled. Finally, I had made it home, two days before the first national lockdown. At eighty-seven, he was seriously ill and needed care. As an only child, I had been preparing for this day all my life. My mom died in 2012, leaving a massive void. Dad and I clung to each other, our bond only deepening.
The initial euphoria of pulling off this small miracle — packing up and closing not just my house, but my private play-therapy practice, didn’t last long. I went full tilt into “driving the bus” — sorting out Dad’s meds, scheduling scans, rearranging the house — so I could fit in the lorry load of belongings that followed me up the motorway, and figuring out where and how our groceries and next bottle of milk were coming from as we learned that we would be quarantined for twelve weeks.
I was so scared of losing him that I chose not to risk going beyond the garden gate. I don’t know how we would have managed without the help of devoted neighbors and a local shopkeeper who left groceries on our doorstep each week. Waving at them through the window was a source of huge comfort during that uncertain time, reassuring us that we were not alone, life existed beyond the garden gate.
Routines anchor me. As a play therapist, I see children in weekly fifty-minute segments; I watch their little faces light up as they come into my therapy room, anxiously searching for their favorite toy, making sure it is in exactly the same place as the week before. I help them find their “safe place” in the room to tell me their stories. Our goodbyes, usually planned, had been cut short, endings crammed into a less than ideal timeframe because I could feel the mounting pressure from Dad’s declining health. I knew I just needed to get to him, and that he would then be ok.
I was putting on a brave face, but I was terrified he might die. Then I would truly be alone. One day, a colleague called and asked after my dad. I plonked myself down on a packing case in my office and, like the children, was suddenly lost for words. Holding that silence for me, it began to sink in. I had stepped into the realm of being the child again.
Over the next weeks and months, it became clear that closing my play therapy practice was not a temporary situation. I had no idea when face-to-face therapy would return, and Dad was too vulnerable to leave; although his condition had stabilized somewhat, we weren’t out of the woods yet, and neither was I. In fact, I entered the thicket.
Sometimes, it’s only when the pressure comes off, when the load inside our invisible backpack starts to feel lighter, that the underlying worries and narrative can surface.
One day, after feeling especially sad, I admitted to Dad that while I was grieving the loss of not seeing the children — buying their paint supplies, holding their “special boxes” that contained the objects they made during their sessions, witnessing their stories — what felt harder still, was being childless. An involuntary choice. Force of circumstance caused by an ovarian cancer diagnosis. While that was long in the past, the absence of the children’s voices, of holding their losses, had reawakened my very private unbearable longing and grief.
Play therapy is magical, a kind of midwifery for children who need a separate space away from school and home, to play out their stories of loss and to disentangle their monstrous feelings. It’s a place where there is no judgment, no expectations of them to be anything other than who they are and feel how they feel on that particular day.
With me, children can let it all out in the paint, on the page, through role-playing, in the sand tray, in card games; yelling, name-calling, funny faces, stomping, ripping up paper, sitting still, withdrawing, inquiring; in building obstacle courses, dens, and hiding places.
Children are endlessly fascinating in the way they share their stories, and in the magical interactions that occur when I engage with them because they invite me to do so. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they want me to observe them, sit beside them quietly; sometimes they just want to know I am there, and that for fifty minutes I will not move if they don’t want me to.
The irony of being in lockdown is that it opened another door. By stepping into the silence, I’d discovered there is no substitute for my being childless or for the loss of my mom. Neither void can be filled.
It was time to leave the sandpit, let the children go, and be present with my Dad, who has turned a real corner. Time to write another book. Fulfill a dream of starting a charity. Focus on my legacy. I’m reminded of the line in the Rumi poem, Bird Wings about grief:
“If it were always a fist, or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings.”
Amanda Seyderhelm is a certified play therapist and author of the books Isaac and the Red Jumper, and Helping Children Cope with Loss and Change: A Guide for Professionals and Parents published by Routledge. She teaches professionals and parents how to use therapeutic storytelling to help children become the heroes and heroines of their stories. She lives in the Amber Valley Peak District of Derbyshire in the U.K. and is working on her next book.
