I am part of an exclusive club. Yes, the mom club, but we’re even more exclusive than that. We are the ones who became moms in the time of coronavirus. It’s a club none of us knew existed and none of us want to be in.
We are the moms who have to navigate the postpartum weeks without the help we’d planned on. We are the moms who have never done this before, have no idea what we’re doing, but have less support than any moms who came before us. We are the moms who wake up every morning with sadness and dread and worry. We worry about our spouse or baby getting sick, we worry that we’ll have to leave the house for necessary groceries, we worry that Target won’t have diapers in stock this week, we worry that we won’t be able to handle one more day in quarantine.
And still we rise. We face another day with our newborn, another day alone, another day in isolation.
We are the only ones who get to hold our babies. We are the only faces they know. We are the ones who know what their sleepy face looks like when it suddenly turns into a wide-eyed grin. We are the only ones who know how to comfort them when they cry, hold them so they quiet down, feed them so they’re milk-drunk and content. We thought we’d have help. We thought others could do this with us.
We are the moms whose hearts break into a million pieces when we have to tell our families they can’t see our baby. We are the ones figuring out how to FaceTime our own parents to show them their grandchild, when we’d sworn we’d never let our 4-week-olds have screentime. We’re shattered as we watch the tears on our mothers’ faces when they see their grandchild growing up without them.
We turn our faces from the screens so they don’t see our own tears, and still we rise.
We are the moms who wake up each morning facing another day of monotony. Another day in the house, another day of the eat, sleep, poop routine. Another day of Netflix and spit-up. There are no mommy and me groups, no grocery store runs, no library time, no lunch dates, no walks around the mall to break up the day. We have no conversation starters and no updates when each day is the same as the last.
We are the ones who struggle to find a clean pair of pants that fit, but also not really caring because we’re not going to see anyone anyway. We the ones who have to juggle the dog walks, the baby cries, the house cleaning and dinner cooking while spouses put their 40 hours in at work in the next room. We are the ones counting down the minutes until 5 o’clock when our husbands can join us again, take the baby, and talk to us about something that reminds us there’s a world out there somehow still turning.
And still, we rise.
Newborn brains are developing and their bodies are growing, and we watch as their little hands learn to grasp and their tiny toes unfurl. But their daily activities remain the same. We all sit on this carousel of eating, sleeping and pooping. They alternate between staring at a toy, staring at a window, or staring at mommy’s face.
Meanwhile we are left to obsess, alone, over whether we’re doing it right. We’re Googling at midnight and panic-calling the pediatrician. We’re buying out the Amazon baby section and freaking out when Target limits the diaper and wipe purchases per customer, if there are even any left on the shelves.
We go to bed exhausted with the realization that we actually didn’t do anything that day. We didn’t even leave the living room.
And still we rise the next day to do it all again.
We are struggling, we are acknowledging it’s hard, we are finding each other and reaching out however we are able. We are wondering if this is what motherhood is or if this is what the coronavirus caused. We wonder if we would have felt this way with a newborn anyway, or if this is because we’re in quarantine. We will never know, because this is our new motherhood. This is our story.
Someday we will tell our babies that they were born in the time of coronavirus. We will tell them that it was hard, that we struggled, that we all cried. We will tell them that their grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins loved them so much, even though they couldn’t see them. We will explain why there are so many pictures of them, from every day, every moment, so we could text the ones who were missing them. We will tell our babies that we did everything we could to keep their little lives normal and to stay happy. And we’ll tell them that we survived. That we were strong.
We will tell them this because they won’t remember this time. They will only know the depths our love. We must take comfort in this. We have to be grateful for this time we have to kiss their baby cheeks a little more and snuggle them a little longer. This is all we can do; this is all we have.
We are the moms who must take each day of uncertainty and isolation as it comes. And each morning we rise again.