Local Profiles

Lisa's Lowdown

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Published March 16, 2021

Last year Smiths Beach’s McLure family entertained us through lockdown with a weekly column on how they coped in 2020.

Now mum Lisa - a hairdresser at Elements Hair Room in Cowes and a personal trainer - is back by popular demand. Using her husband Tim, and two kids Angus, 11, and Evie, 7, as inspiration, she’s starting a weekly column looking at being a working mum in the pandemic.

“I haven’t seen my dad in Newcastle since July 2019. He was meant to come down here in March last year but then the lockdown happened.
I was meant to go up in June, but lockdown stopped that. He turned 70 last August and we again couldn’t go up. He says he’ll only turn 70 once he sees me.

At Christmas we were again planning to go up and as the time came closer and closer I had an aching dread as there were more and more Covid cases in NSW.
I told Tim we’re still going, we’re still going, even if I burst through the borders.

But then the day before we were set to go, I sat down defeated and realised I couldn’t go. It’s normally a 12-hour drive but to avoid Sydney’s lockdown we were going to have to drive west which would have taken about 20 hours. There’s way more devastating things in the world, but my dad and step mum aren’t getting any younger.

So, now, after four cancellations I’m now going up this week. Finally I can hug my dad.

It’s my birthday this week too and my brother has come back from the US, where he’s engaged to a girl, and he’s done his quarantine. I’m going by myself because I’m scared to take the kids in case there’s another snap lockdown. If anything happens it’s easier just to get me back. You just don’t know these days, it changes so quickly. I’m flying from Melbourne and going for four days. I can’t go for any longer because nothing stops here with the kids.

I just can’t wait to have a wine together with my family and sit on the back deck because you don’t get that connection over the phone. But I won’t be happy until I’m sitting on the plane.

It has been weird since the last column after coming out of lockdown last year. We all started planning things and making small steps to freedom.
Everyone – not just me – was starting to unclench and breath and everyone was talking about future plans.

As soon as I heard about the last snap lockdown I flipped and stopped at the bottle shop. I was not buying toilet paper. I was buying wine. I told Tim I was on a juice cleanse. It just happened to be grape juice.

It wasn’t just me, it flipped everyone.

The first 24 hours of the snap lockdown I was anxious but then I gave myself a kick in the butt. I told myself OK there will be some home school learning, I won’t be able to run my home PT business, and I won’t be able to work in the salon.

I got on Facebook and said I’d had a brain fart with the wine.

As awful as it was to lose business, I found the general consensus - especially from mothers who were exhausted - was they like being forced to stop for a week.
After the long lockdown we hit the ground running. Then with the snap lockdown suddenly we didn’t have to do the school run and drive around for soccer or tennis and the 10,000 other things we do.
Money-wise it was sh*t-house, but just being able to stop was wonderful.

I do think 2020 changed us. Even things we’d toyed with doing we decided to do because we want to live for now. Just do it. We only have a couple of short years with the kids before they disappear so we need to make the most of it.

Also I think it made us realise how much pressure we put on ourselves to be social when we don’t need to. We run here there and everywhere but we don’t need to go to parties every weekend. You can just stop.”