About a year and a half ago, my husband and I decided it was time for kid number two. We were excited to grow our little family and thought a two year age gap between siblings would be perfect.
So in late 2019 I got pregnant, completely unaware that we were heading straight into a global pandemic.
We took a cross country trip to visit the in-laws in January 2020 and stayed in Upstate New York for two weeks. I remember flying back to the west coast that February. Stopped at a layover in Chicago, I watched a large group of masked people deboard an international flight. As we all sat scrolling on our phones, reading about rumors of a new virus spreading in foreign countries, the masks seemed ominous.
That spring it had hit locally and things began to shift. People were staying home, my husband's job at the hospital got tense, and my doctor’s office stopped allowing anyone to come to appointments with me.
I remember getting an ultrasound, laying in the dark room alone with just the sonographer, listening to the baby’s heartbeat. Something about that moment stands out amongst the rest. The feeling of it truly being just me and my baby, hit me in a heavy way. With pregnancy number one, they found a few red flags during a routine ultrasound that led to a myriad of other doctor visits and specialists appointments. The thought of having to do all that by myself felt so incredibly lonely. Fortunately, none of that came to be this time around. So we moved forward as “normally” as we could.
I stayed home with my quickly growing belly and my busy two year old daughter, limiting our activities to the outdoors and praying for lots of naps. We didn’t have childcare out of an abundance of caution, not really knowing what was happening or how bad it was or could be or ever would get. Our island was small, and lonely.
I worried about what we’d do when it came time to have the baby. Reading the news every day of hospitals not allowing partners in with birthing women. Checking and rechecking with my doctor about what was allowed for us. Wondering what we’d do with our toddler when I had to leave. My first came over three weeks early and I wasn’t very confident that this would be much different.
We thought about every possible option and finally agreed to have my mother in law come out from the east coast a few weeks before I was due. It felt impractical to have her quarantine alone for a week when she arrived, so we didn’t. Of course, my pregnant brain worried about every little thing all of the time, as it would anyway, but definitely a bit more in 2020.
About a week after my MIL’s arrival, my water broke and we were off to the hospital at 3am on June 25, while my toddler slept, unaware, in her bedroom. The hour long drive through the mountains to the hospital went by surprisingly quickly as I timed my contractions… 5 minutes, 4 minutes… We were greeted at the front desk with a wheelchair and instructed to put masks on. I had to be tested for Covid - which was both horrifying given the circumstances and also oddly comforting, at least once they came into the room to say I had tested negative.
Everything went well, my husband was allowed to be with me the whole time, and the next day we were driving home with our little boy.
The next couple of months were a blur of doctor’s visits and reading news and getting little sleep, wondering when this pandemic would ever end. We lived in Oregon at the time, and as if 2020 wasn’t bad enough, the entire state caught fire, and I spent days inside with my toddler and newborn, trying to keep some type of clean airflow.
As months dragged on, my husband and I grew anxious to have the bigger support system of his family around. It had always been our plan to move closer to them on the east coast once our little family was complete, but it was just an idea in the back of our minds. The further into the year we got, however, the more it felt like a necessity. This pandemic was apparently not going anywhere and we couldn’t do it alone anymore.
I don’t know if it was the fog of two sleep deprived new parents or the draining nature of 2020, that caused us to make an impulsive decision to set a deadline for ourselves and get across the country as fast as we could. We pulled the trigger and almost immediately realized we needed more time, but it was a little too late, so we jumped in head first and scrambled the best we could.
With help from the in-laws and good friends, we quickly packed up and left a life we had known together on the west coast for almost a decade.
I flew across the country with my mother in law, two year old daughter, and 8 month old baby. That’s a story to tell another day, but we made it! And a week later, my husband and father in law, who had driven the car across the country, made it, too.
And here we are. The year is 2021. No jobs. Two kids. Living with the in-laws. And learning to navigate what looks to be, possibly, some light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.
We have a long way to go, on all fronts. But we’re here, we’re hopeful, and we’re together. All of us, as it should be. None of us were ever meant to go it alone. A life long lesson I’m repeatedly unlearning and leaning into.
Besides writing this story, I haven’t really processed much of 2020. I don’t think many of us have. It might be a new year, but it doesn’t feel much like a different year. It feels like we’re still in the thick of it, just trying to survive - trying to make it through.
And so I ask - are we all still in survival mode? Because I don’t feel ready to thrive.
I don’t feel ready to jump back into life as if I didn’t just emerge from the dumpster fire that was last year. I think 2021 needs to be a time of reflection, a time to process, a time to consider what things are best left back in that dumpster fire and not brought forward into the next season of life.
I’d also like to acknowledge my incredible privilege - that I could write the entirety of my 2020 experience and not have to mention the racial tension and protests and injustices felt across the nation. And while that will be unpacked in future editions of this column, I felt the need to mention it here - to call it out because it needs to be said.
I also want to acknowledge that all my fears of being alone during pregnancy and childbirth and not being supported as well as I may have otherwise been because of this pandemic, is also deeply privileged. Not only do many women go through it alone in general, but the maternal mortality rate in our country is two to three times higher for Black women than it is for white women like me. That’s only exacerbated by a pandemic.
So yes - this is my story and my fears, feelings, and experiences are all valid. But I would be remiss to share any of it without acknowledging how steeped in privilege I am.
As we enter the spring of 2021, let’s pause for self-reflection and open our eyes the community at large and how we fit into it. It’s okay to feel however you feel in this moment. It’s been alot. It is alot. I for one am not striving to thrive this year as much as I am longing to heal.
Maybe healing is the new thriving.