On the 24thth March 2020, the New Zealand Prime Minister announced the country would go into a Covid-19 lockdown. Two days later a new reality dawned with all businesses, organisations and educational institutions closed, except those deemed ‘essential’. Within a week media reports started to emerge, suggesting that Covid -19 would adversely impact on women and girls to a greater extent and that women make up the majority of workers in frontline essential work. In order to make sense of this lockdown experience, the authors of this article, four academic women, reached out to each other to share their lockdown experiences in a collaborative research project. Drawing on narrative inquiry methodology, this article highlights storytelling as a method to explore, analyse and present new understandings about the phenomenon. This article confirms how lockdown created boundaries for the authors. These are reflected in the creation of a personal experience story i.e one summative narrative in which Lisa is the representative character, the “good girl”. The story illustrates the dislocation and disconnection imposed on the authors during lockdown and depicts the internal and external struggles of being “expected” to continue in various ‘gendered’ roles as a caring mother, manager, daughter, grandmother, and academic.