I’d like to preface this by confirming that I have absolutely no regrets about having my baby right now and 100% know how lucky I am to have had a healthy little one, but pregnancy during a pandemic has been hard.
In my last post, I talked about the 5 ways that having a pandemic baby didn’t suck. Now let’s talk about why it did.
The following are 5 ways it was bad.
#1 The Isolation
The pandemic has brought out a new side of people – some have COVID kinks like watching very specific neighbourhood birds go about their lives, expensive new skincare routines, abandoning hygiene in favour of your tie-dye sweatsuit, or any number of new behaviours. No matter what way you slice it, though, it’s lonely as fuck. Being pregnant, you are so nervous and excited to be bringing this new thing into the world and at a time you should be surrounded by loved ones, you are alone.
#2 Sacrificing Experiences for Safety
Part of the fun of being pregnant is supposed to be attending all of those prenatal classes, making new friends with other parents who are just as scared shitless as you are, and going out to show off that pregnancy glow (fine, for me, more like pregnancy death mask). But when you have a little bean in there relying on you and the country is shutting down around you, you have to forgo a lot of those normal, community-building chances.
#3 The Crippling Worry
In a pandemic, when you are told that the breathing problems in your last trimester would be made much worse by contracting COVID and there isn’t enough research to determine what would happen to baby, you just can’t accept that risk. So the usual worries you have already had while pregnant multiply and morph into some kind of zombie apocalypse scenario. Then your anxiety kicks up because you’re so worried about what being worried will do to your baby. My heart is pounding just typing this.
#4 Being Alone at Ultrasounds
That first ultrasound, before you’ve felt any fetal movement and know anything that is going on with your baby because all of your doctor’s appointments so far have been over the phone, you want the comfort of your partner holding your hand and being by your side to ensure that everything is okay. For my first one, I actually made a scene and insisted that my husband come in the room (masked of course) but I physically couldn’t handle the stress. The other two, I sucked it up. The most terrifying moments in my pregnancy were facing those ultrasounds solo.
#5 My Baby Has Never Been Kissed, Except by Us
The world took a lot of things for granted before the pandemic, myself very much included. But I never thought that my daughter would reach four months old never having been kissed by my parents, never having been held by them without a mask, never being held at all by any of our friends.
So, to all those mommies and daddies out there who are braving this time because, like me, it fell when you were already planning to grow your family, the way your work has been affected has made this time ideal to become pregnant, you are heroically sticking with an accidental pregnancy, or whatever your personal circumstance, you are kicking ass and you are not alone.