Cheers and tears as we open up

It was a rare day I had left my house and in a car. My Yr 10 son had just returned to school after 8 months homeschooling, his Yr 7 sister two weeks earlier.

I was tentatively stepping back into the school run. This one though was perhaps the most emotional of all school runs in my entire mothering history.

I shared my reaction in an ecstatic tweet, and within seconds Leigh Sales has retweeted. From there it snowballed, the re-tweets in rapid acceleration. (119 re-shared on the last count. That makes my usual 2 likes look darn pathetic)

My phone pipped like a snappy terrier – the Twitter inbox shook to life. BBC wanted to know if I had pictures, ABC sent a message for background info, journalists re-shared and commented that Victorian’s would always remember where they were.

By the day’s end, I was a lead tweet in The Guardian. The next day, I’d influenced the headline of the Saturday Paper.

The little tweet that could capture the zeitgeist of the moment. The spirit of celebration released into the land of social media. 

As I share this joy I’m inherently aware that not all Victorian’s have the same level of joy. Many of us are mourning business and job losses, lonely or traumatised, missing family and friends, grieving family members lost to the virus and expressing from re-entry anxiety about safety.

But I’ll certainly never forget the moment we were allowed that joyous news, that the state-wide sacrifices isolation came to an end, and we were gifted such joyous news.

I had indulgently compared it to the pulling down of the Berlin Wall, the sweeping soldiers dancing and kissing civilians in the streets at the end of wars (those less kissing and touching).

Of course, this does not compare to those dark times. But the emotions elation and relief is the same, no matter the challenge and trauma.

And smile, bloody hard! We Melburnians and outer Metro folk have earnt this moment, and we deserve this sweet shout of happiness.