When was the last time you dreamed of a beautiful future for your children? Let me tell you, it’s been more than a year that I have imagined a life that is anything but about masks, sanitisation, social distancing, vaccinations, tests, labs, hospitals etc. Is that the normal our children are going to grow into?

I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl a few years ago. While I knew she would have to fight a lot of battles for being who she is, there was one that wasn’t taken in account. When COVID 19 hit our lives last year, we saw numerous posts about how we have brought it upon ourselves, how we neglected to take care of our planet, how we have been careless about our lives, how , at the end of the day we blamed the humankind for the doom. We struggled last year, we stayed at home for months, we quarantined for weeks, we prayed for a vaccine and so this year, the efforts of all paid off and we were off to a good start in 2021.

Little did we know that we had to prepare for the worst, that 2020 was just the tip of the iceberg. This year, while parks and schools are shut, rallies and leagues take centre stage. When our children should have started their academics and made new friends, they have to sit at home and wonder what they did wrong. It’s heart breaking to make a 4 year old understand the importance of wearing a mask or stay indoors when all she wants to do is play with her friend. When adults are struggling with anxiety and depression, these little ones are feeling things they can’t even put into words. This isn’t the world that we told them stories about, the world that was full of beautiful adventures and a world that was their oyster, it is a scary world when you have to think twice before talking to your neighbours.

Her childhood was supposed to be drastically different; I pictured a happy, social child who was enjoying school each day every day.  How can a toddler make sense of this world when I am myself struggling to deal with reality? So now we have made our own version of reality, we live in castle like Jasmin from Aladdin who isn’t allowed to step into the village, we are trapped like Sleeping Beauty who lives locked away, and we wait for the world to become better. These fairy tales are our escape from this, we watch one movie every day and sleep with their stories in our minds. Hoping that in our dreams we live in their worlds where at the end, everything becomes alright and they live happily ever after…