The Threat of Proximity

Among many of the questions being raised in this period of deep uncertainty is how we will get out of this? Practically speaking, this question can be addressed to our politicians who are so far setting the guidelines, time frames and social limits on each country as they see fit. But what is slowly dawning on us, at least in the UK, is that most of us will have to come out of isolation and relax social distancing before the threat is really over; it is becoming obvious that there will be no clear-cut ending to this crisis. Most of us will slowly go back to work without a definitive sense that the virus has disappeared. The seemingly finite resolution of a vaccine will not, in the end, be so simple. So how will we emerge out of this, practically and psychologically? How will we go back to feeling safe in the presence of others? Will an unknown, invisible threat be passing between people, unspoken, as we try to repatch the social fabric after this crisis? It is the proximity of real bodies which has endangered us and the new signifier ‘social isolation’ – that which should protect us – ironically touches on what we try to alleviate through our Maison Verte spaces. So what place will the social space of the Maison Verte have now?

Ordinary Isolation

For young children in the early years of life, between 0 and 4 years old, there will undoubtedly be a sense that all is not well. Yet, there will not necessarily be a language to symbolise the dis-ease that is in the air, or these strange circumstances in which we are living. Additionally, these children will be missing out on that vital moment of the first social interactions outside the home – those interactions where the delicate but defining balance between separation and attachment have a chance to be played out.

On top of this strange, unprecedented type of social deprivation, many women have also been forced to give birth alone where hospitals are not allowing visitors or birth partners to attend. This is a potentially traumatic experience for mothers and may be compounded by the fact that many of these mothers and children have not had the chance to meet their extended family. Many mothers will have been separated from vital support networks.

However, in normal times we know that alongside the ordinary joy of birth there also exists an ordinary despair experienced privately, and often, and of which little is spoken of. The quiet emotional, social and psychic isolation of new mothers has been of concern in our contemporary, refracted lives for some time. Will this be amplified by what we now call ‘social isolation’? And what about the parents who’s busy lives left little time for the family? There has also been a ‘forced socialisation’ within the family group itself and, I wonder, how has that been experienced?

What Next?

In the emergency of the pandemic these private experiences will not yet be exposed but I want to think ahead, and to provide what is essentially a place of welcome for these young families and children, and to create a space that functions in between the isolation of home and the first tentative steps back into the social world. This has always been the function of the Maison Verte but this function has become urgent in an interventionist sense, in that we must be there to receive these families when the restrictions are lifted. And we must use the time we have now to think about how we will receive them, slowly, delicately, thoughtfully, and how we will think about this repatching of the social fabric alongside them.

The Maison Verte has two aims: it offers and welcomes speech in the place of experience, and it welcomes the child as a subject alongside their parents. These aims now take on a new value at a decisive moment in time. Our society is questioning the disparate, busy lives that neoliberalism insists upon and now is the time to create local spaces for the community to be together, and where parents can take time to see their children play freely and explore the new experience of the social world at their own pace and in their own way. Just as we will all have to do together.

Written by Catherine from The Green House Playgroup