Our child was born into a world of fire; he arrived on a bushfire Saturday as large parts of the New South Wales south coast went up in flames.
He is growing into a world of enforced detachment. We had expected the early months of parenthood to be tiring and dull and unadventurous. We had not contemplated that our boy might go months without meeting another person; that we might spend months without the support and love of our extended families.
The boy is a first grandchild on both sides. My parents have been expectant grandparents for more than a decade. In his first few months, we had repeated visits from family members and friends from across the country. Our introduction to parenthood was a full house of people bringing freezer meals and staying for afternoon tea; an endless stream of baby gawkers and helpers to do loads of washing or give the house a vacuum.
Then the visits stopped, the world folded in on itself, and we were left on our own. Neither of us really envisaged raising a child so physically remote from our families and friends. But the Queensland border is closed and most are on the other side.
Daily video calls with family are one thing. It is another to be able to place your child in loving arms, or to call on someone at a pinch, if one of us is unwell or tired or just needs to put the screaming little shit down. Such a situation can snowball. You heap exhaustion upon exhaustion because you have a child now and there’s no other option.
Both his parents are proud introverts and thought isolation might not really affect our inward-looking little lives. We’re more comfortable at home on a Friday night; eager to be friendly rather than close friends with most people in our orbit.
We live in a quiet neighbourhood in north Brisbane, and we have made some friends locally. Though in fairness it is our dog, Dennis, the family exhibitionist, who is mostly responsible for these connections and has an uncanny ability to sniff out interesting folks.
If you’re one of Dennis’s people, he’ll spot you from a distance and his body will oscillate with excitement until he can say hello. One of his friends is an older man who we haven’t seen since the pandemic started. We hope he’s OK but don’t know his name.
Most introverts like us aren’t bereft of the desire to be surrounded by people – it’s just that we prefer the small circles of those we know and love, and who make us comfortable.
Isolation is a saddening experience even for those of us without expansive social lives. It’s odd to crave the resumption of awkward conversations at the cafe.
In isolation, your world shrinks. We cannot take our child to the cafe for him to be admired by friends, or for us to be pitied by strangers when he takes a turn towards tantrum.
Our boy cannot be held by our parents, or anyone really but us. Such a situation creates its own anxieties; will he become resistant to new people, and perhaps too reliant on those closest to him? Will he grow to feel unusual about the prospect of new friends and new love?
What I feel most acutely is the anxiety that our boy is growing into a world where we cannot inspire him with “oh the places you’ll go”, but where we are forced to protect him by reining in those instincts to explore and travel and seek knowledge.
Before he was born, my wife and I would regularly discuss the morality of bringing a child into a world that had, even then, seemingly gone to shit. The thought that best consoled us was the belief our boy might possibly be extraordinary. For every instinct we had to shield him from the world, how could we deprive the world of him?
Our wish for him now is to be able to be ordinary. A happy introvert like his parents if he chooses. He may not solve the climate crisis or alter our shared existence in any meaningful way, and that would be OK.
The poet Philip Larkin had a seemingly odd wish for a newborn, which he wrote in Born Yesterday: “May you be ordinary ... in fact, may you be dull”. Those words seem to make more sense now.
My boy will eventually be allowed to play with other children; to see his grandparents again, to make a scene at a cafe. What we’ve learned from him these past few weeks is that these ordinary things themselves can truly affect the world, and that we should not forget to cherish them when they return.
• Ben Smee is Guardian Australia’s Queensland correspondent
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