Covid Babies Come Out to Play

As restrictions lift in Los Angeles, and nearly fifty percent of our city is vaccinated, I am peeking out from my den after a long hibernation. I strap Baby Sky into her stroller and boldly set out into the world that has been, for over a year, closed off to us. I’m overcome by the feeling that I’m not at all the same person that I was before.

When our first lockdown hit in March 2019, I was three months pregnant, yet to announce the good news to any but my closest family and friends. Just as my energy was returning, my nausea finally lifting, and I was ready to tell the world that I was going to be a mom, the world as I knew it, was over.

How to describe that time as a new mom to be? In the already tumultuous state of pregnancy, every support I thought I’d have from the wise women who had tread this path before me, was suddenly off the table.

In the years before, when I was still figuring out if and when I’d have a child, I had watched all my friends going to their pre-natal yoga classes, hospital tours, birthing classes, mom groups. Having gender reveal parties, baby showers, babymoons.

Their families surrounding them on their journey. And now that it was my turn, all of that was gone. There was so much confusion, fear, discord, and instability. I grew larger, wobblier, and there wasn’t enough to lean on.

I was suddenly a Covid-Mom having a Covid-Baby, an undesirable lot. To be in a period of quarantine and anxiety during such a tricky and transformative time was disappointing. Isolating.

Hard.

Every time that I read a pregnancy book that advised me to ‘join mom groups’ and ‘find my tribe,’ I wanted to throw it against the wall and cry, “if only!”

It goes without saying that no matter what sector of your life you were in during our year plus under Covid restrictions and lock downs, that it was a challenge. When I was feeling sorry for myself during those long hard months, I often tried to think of all the others who had it hard too. Highschool seniors.

People with an illness. Parents working full time with little kids at home. Athletes. Musicians. Fitness instructors. Restaurant workers. Small business owners.

Those who lost a loved one to the virus, or to anything. The list went on and on, and it only served to make my pregnant-hormonal-self feel gloomier.

The difficulty of this time was felt as a collective and it hung over us like a giant global cloud.

I hated that my tiny growing fetus might feel it too. How could she not?

It was a dark time. We stocked up on cleaning supplies, huddled close to our loved ones, and tried to make it through. But the pendulum swings.

Now it’s the summer of 2021. I finally feel the hope of our emerging upturn.

There’s still plenty wrong in this world, it’s not all butterflies and sunshine, but at least we can meet a friend for coffee to discuss it now. My mom, now fully vaccinated, was able to meet my baby after 8 months!

Exercise classes and mom groups are moving off of zoom. I can take Sky to a baby gymnastics or music class.

It finally feels OK to ask another mom and baby to come over to play. How exciting to begin to peak out from our solitude and try to find others to share this life with.

It feels a little like freshman year of college, where everyone is dying to meet someone with similar interests, to feel connected, and known. That was a good time.

A time of openness and newness. The world felt full of possibility. It does now, too.

I am hopeful that as much as fetus Sky may have felt the world in its gloomiest state, that now, nine-month-old Sky will get to experience the energy of a beautiful lifting of at least one large societal cloud.

Together, she and I feel the wonder of being at a park, a restaurant, a store, a social gathering. We smile, mask free, when we pass others, and they smile back, instead of quickly lifting their face covering and awkwardly trying to stay 6 feet away.

It feels so nice to do all the small things that I once took for granted. To be able to see the world anew, the way my baby does.

What a difference a year can make. Last June my belly bulged, my hips hurt, and I was petrified that my doula wouldn’t be able to be at my birth, that I’d have to labor for hours with a facemask on, that my friends and family would never get to meet my baby.

Worst of all I worried that somehow my husband, or baby, or I, would come down with Covid-19. This June, I can finally breathe. I know not everyone can. There has been so much loss. But I recognize my fortune. I hope that others will recognize theirs too.

It seems a perfect time to embrace changes within and without, to embrace who we have and will become as we enter back into the world. “Look at those eyes,” they say about my baby, “she’s beautiful.” And I am something I never was before, a proud momma out in the world.