Each and every one of us was affected by the pandemic. For many it continues to have a lasting impact. This is your opportunity to help the Inquiry learn the right lessons from the pandemic.
Every Story Matters provides everyone in the UK with an opportunity to help the UK Covid-19 Inquiry to understand the impact of the pandemic. By sharing your experience, you could help the Inquiry to find the right answers and shape the future for generations to come.
Each individual experience shared will count and will be summarised and provided to the Inquiry as evidence of the human impact of the pandemic.
If you were pregnant, gave birth or had a very young baby or child during the pandemic, then your story could be vital to inform the Inquiry’s investigations and shape recommendation for the future.
Stories like Gina’s below.
Gina’s Story.
'My five-year-old daughter Elizabeth was sitting on my lap as we watched then PM Boris Johnson announce the imminent closure of all schools on the evening of 18th March 2020. It seemed so unreal at the time, and I remember my husband and I nervously laughing – surely it would only be for a couple of weeks, right?
Later that evening, when Elizabeth was in bed, we started to think about how home-schooling would actually work – I work four days a week and my husband was working full time for his business. I can’t imagine how working parents with more than one child must have felt that evening.
Although my employer sent out an email to say the company would be supportive of parents trying to juggle home-schooling, the reality was that my job in publishing was full-on and tight deadlines meant it wasn’t feasible for me to take off hours on end during the working day.
At first, I naively thought I could ‘do it all’ and cram in a week’s worth of schoolwork on my day off and at the weekends but in practice that wasn’t possible as my daughter’s school required classwork to be in the same day so it could be marked. Instead, the three of us fell into something that resembled a routine – heading out first thing for a walk in our local nature reserve (always the highlight of our day), before we fired up our laptops and started working.
As Elizabeth was so young, she needed a lot of guidance with her schoolwork but
the trouble I find with juggling is that I always feel like I’m just doing two jobs badly. If I wasn’t helping Elizabeth, I felt guilty, but if I neglected my job, I felt I was letting down my team.
I’d start each day with the intention of being a brilliant mum – and employee - but by 10.30 most days, I was already tired of picking up dropped pencils and would find myself snapping at my lovely little girl (sometimes at colleagues too). There were very few days when neither of us cried at least once.
It was important for me to share my story with Every Story Matters to hopefully ensure that my experience as a working mum juggling homeschooling is learned from. Now it’s all over I wonder how those weeks that turned into months will affect my daughter in years to come. Will she only remember the times when I lost it with her for forgetting her number bonds or for scribbling over her work when the frustration became too much for her young mind to cope with? I hope not with all my heart. I hope she also remembers the fun we had colouring each other’s hair with chalk and the ‘pool party’ we had for my birthday - just the two of us in our swimming costumes in a baby’s paddling pool - but only time will tell.'
Just like Gina, your story is valuable and could help change the future. Every Story Matters really wants to hear your experience. It’s simple to submit your story, just follow this link www.everystorymatters.co.uk.