I hadn’t seen my parents for two years. Getting them to Sydney as soon as we could was daunting | Eleanor Limprecht
When travel restrictions finally eased, I texted my mother straight away to buy tickets. She’s not a spontaneous person so I could tell it stressed her out
It’s 6.30am on an overcast Friday morning and I’m at the international terminal of Sydney airport for the first time in years. The arrivals hall is eerily empty. A huge screen right where the passengers walk out flashes with a McDonald’s ad: “Do you want hugs with that?” Against all logic the stupid thing is making me tear up. I do, but I’m not allowed. My mother and stepfather are about to arrive after more than 30 hours in transit from Washington DC to Sydney, and I’m to keep my distance, take them for Covid tests, then straight to the apartment hotel we’ve booked for their isolation. Hugs are not on the menu, even though I haven’t seen them in two years.
“Either they isolate or your whole family isolates,” the woman from NSW Health explained to me on the phone the day before, when I called to clarify the new rules. She said I could pick them up from the airport to drop them to their hotel, but I had to wear a mask and stay apart. I couldn’t stomach the idea of locking my parents in a bedroom in our house for 72 hours. With end-of year events, sports games and sleepovers, I also did not want to lock my young teenagers in. When I explained the plan to my mother, she was amenable. “We’ll have time at the hotel to get over our jet lag. And it’s better than 14 days,” she said.
Read the original article at The Guardian