Luna says long COVID has completely changed the way she parents her children.

Transcript

I discovered pretty early on that if I push myself out of bed, if I have that wakeup energy of, “I better get up and do that thing, get the garbage out to the street or get the kid to school,” that I could be sick for the rest of the day, just from having that initial push out of bed. So I’m very lucky that my kids are 11 and 15. And when this all started the younger one was nine, and there were times when I had to walk them to school and it just devastated my health for that – like if I had a week where that was my responsibility, I was sick the whole week, sick like not being able to work at all. So I found a mother nearby who was willing to walk them to school and that was very helpful. And then after a little while they really were old enough to walk themselves to school so that’s been great. But now it’s completely changed from the way I used to be a parent because I don’t emerge in the morning anymore. I just lie in bed until I feel like I can get up … I feel sad for my youngest that I did sort of entirely bow out of their mornings [laughs], when I did used to be quite present and I think that’s the kind of thing when they grow up they’ll be like, “My mother abandoned me.” But it isn’t all day and my older one has done a lot of stepping up and being quite sort of – she’s already a little bit maternal. Sometimes I have to sort of say, “No, I’m the mother actually” [laughs]. But in that sense my younger one gets a lot of being cared for because she gets her sister caring, they get their sister caring for them and me too and their dad. So, I don’t know, we – I feel very supported by them in the sense that they haven’t complained.

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