Covid abyss puts a cruel twist on the misspent youth adage
MY son finished his last year in college last Friday. My daughter finished her first year. She has never met her college friends. He hasn’t seen his in over a year. Honestly, I don’t know which of them I feel more sorry for.
I feel bad for him because I don’t think I was ever as involved with his college degree as I was with my older daughter’s. Maybe it’s a middle child thing, or maybe it was because he went to IADT in Dún Laoghaire, and that was miles away. When he socialised with his many college friends, they always converged somewhere over there. Maybe it was an out of sight, out of mind thing. Which I feel terrible about now, because I never got to meet the famous Seán or any of the girls he knocked around with. Maybe I thought we’d get around to it one day, before he left. Because I thought there would be loads of time.
And I know this isn’t about me, but while I’m beating myself up, there is also the awkward fact that he was studying media, and for kind of obvious reasons, I sort of know quite a lot about that. But we always had other stuff to talk about and laugh over and so, aside from organising his work placement for him, I don’t think I was any help to him at all. And certainly in this past year, as he worked quietly in his bedroom, I didn’t even really know what he was doing. He tells me he will be getting a degree in the autumn sometime, which is both reassuring and baffling in equal measure.
I was way more hands-on with The Youngest, because it was her first year and she needed quite a bit of help to get up and running. She is in Trinity, though I use the word ‘in’ loosely. In her first academic year, she has never been on campus apart from two trips, by appointment, to the library.
It has been a muddle of a year for her, and, I’d imagine, for everyone trying to navigate online third-level education for the first time. There have been loads of stories of unmuted microphones, unattended cameras, schedule clashes, missed messages about tutorials, lectures that were supposed to be live but turned out to be recorded.
Her salvation has come from Players, the drama society she was so keen to join and that kept her on the right side of sanity with their weekly Zoom meetings that could get very boozy and go on till 4am. You could hear the craic of those meetings through the bedroom walls, and it was nice to hear.
On the night of the Players Ball, a few weeks back, she got all dressed up in shimmering evening wear, made herself a cocktail and disappeared for a long night that ended with her ‘wandering into break-out rooms’ where everyone was asleep with their camera on. She needed a couple of long stints in the bathroom to recover and the following morning, I found myself silently giving thanks that she hadn’t been out, relying on taxis and the kindness of strangers. But she should have been out – and now I know that when she does start going out again, when she meets her new friends in real life, I’m going to struggle with that in a way I never did with the older two.
My son did get to go out though. On the evening they finished their last online session, he and a bunch of his classmates met in Blackrock Park. When the gardaí ran them out of there, they went to a field near UCD.
WHEN they were cleared away from that, they went to the canal. The legendary Seán fell in. I really wish I’d met him. And I really wish that, on his last night of college, my son hadn’t been chased by the gardaí three times.
And now he doesn’t know what to do with himself. ‘What am I supposed to do now, in the day?’ he asked me yesterday, when I haven’t a clue. He is deflated, bereft, idle and, until his retail job resumes, very bored.
This is what life is like for so many of our young people now. The twitching curtain brigade only see the thronged beach in Salthill or the canal or the parks; they don’t see the countless hours spent sitting alone in bedrooms desperately trying to connect with people they’ve never met or trying to keep in touch with friends they can no longer see. They don’t see the suffocating boredom and frustration of knowing the best years of your life are being spent in front of a screen.
My daughter’s last day in school, over a year ago, was a non-event. It didn’t even merit a mark on the calendar. Now, my son’s last day in college has gone much the same way. This pandemic is very hard on everyone. But right now, for once, I really don’t envy our young people on their youth.