Reclamation

Stacey Harris

CW: depression, intrusive thoughts, brief suicidal ideation

I got pregnant at the end of 2019. I had been out of town, attending a seminar for work, which is funny to say because I was a restaurant manager at the time, so it’s not like I was adding six-sigma vocabulary to my arsenal. But when I arrived home, my husband apparently missed me, and the resulting tiny human arrived in mid-August of 2020.

In between those events, however, came a series of unfortunate circumstances, starting with the pandemic that shut down the country. We were afraid to breathe, lest we contract a respiratory disease that was killing and hospitalizing others by the millions. So we took the necessary precautions. This meant that my husband couldn’t attend our child’s anatomy scan and meant that any sort of familial support system I may have otherwise had was scattered to the wind. What a strange feeling it is to walk through a hospital, while wearing multiple masks and cradling your expanding belly as if you could protect your unborn child from the air with your arms. A hazmat suit would have been a welcome wardrobe addition, truly.

I lost my job early in March of 2020, which turned out to be a blessing because the free government healthcare was a thousand times better than the shitty discount insurance my previous restaurant job had provided. I cried in my car because I was absolutely terrified of the world I would be bringing my child into more times than I had my blood drawn, and more times than I heard my child’s heartbeat at prenatal appointments.

And then of course there’s the entire concept of pregnancy that will absolutely fuck with your brain. The moment that little pregnancy test reads positive, you cease to be your own person. Your own wants and needs are on hold for the entirety of your time as a vessel, because that’s what you are, at least for the first trimester, when it’s impossible to have a relationship with the sea monkey who has bogarted your life from the inside-out. Add to that the fact that your spouse cannot possibly understand what it feels like to go through pregnancy, and how absurdly alone you feel all the time — even though you’re never alone, not for one second.

Your daily life becomes about planning for the baby. Everything you eat is for the baby. If you sleep on your back in the third trimester, the weight of the baby can compress an important blood vessel, cutting off circulation to your lower half and potentially killing you both. There is an enormous amount of pressure to do everything perfectly for this being that kicks you in the bladder and rearranges your organs on the regular, while your own personality fades into the background. You begin to feel empathy for the Mona Lisa — hanging on display in a temperature-controlled glass case, with no agency of her own.

A time that is supposed to be about celebrating life and bringing a perfect little human into the world was permanently clouded by the fear and hopelessness of the pandemic and its resulting isolation. It’s hard to feel joyful about a pregnancy when you can’t leave your house and all the mom friends you’d hoped to make never materialize. Instead, all your community-building is limited to social media messages and an online support group for other pandemic first-time moms. That said, the moms I did meet, mostly as a result being “Active on Twitter in New Orleans”, are such a goddamn blessing, which is not a word I ever use, and I am grateful for our shared connections every single day.

And then came the actual business of having my baby. I was 36 when my son was born, which is just on the wrong side of the arbitrary line in the sand that designates someone as being of “advanced maternal age.” Nothing makes you feel better about your situation like constantly being reminded of your geriatric status. But as a result of this, my doctor wrote in my chart that I desired an induction, which was in no way true. In truth, I had a remarkably easy pregnancy, and I really expected that level of ease to continue. But as we blew past our due date, my OB let me know that science would be taking the wheel from here on out, despite there being no demonstrated need for it to do so. From here, my idea of what would happen during the birth of my son went off the rails. And while I won’t go into too much detail, I will say that nearly everything that COULD have gone wrong, did. An induction. A failure to progress. A C-section. Bleeding. Fever. An extended hospital stay. Hemorrhaging. An ambulance ride. Blood transfusions. And alone with my thoughts  and the needs of a newborn for nearly all of it. Sets the stage nicely for a whole world of emotional pain.

My husband got two whole weeks off, for what his bosses considered sufficient paternity leave, and then had to go back to running his restaurant for 12-14 hours a day. I sat at home with a newborn, wearing supportive garments to help my displaced organs find their way home and trying to figure out what to do with myself and my brand-new baby. I started an internship the following week. It  could not have been more poorly timed because I was actively drowning in responsibility, anxiety, and the inability to deal with it all. An ouroboros of anxiety, dysfunction, and depression with every day overwhelmingly the same as the one before it.

I don’t know how much blame to attribute to Covid-19 and how much to pin on postpartum depression. I was spiraling every single day until my son was about 5 months old. I cried all the time. I was horribly overwhelmed and felt totally alone and the only person I had to talk to was my husband, who was working from 8am until 10pm to keep his restaurant open because he was the sole breadwinner. The intrusive thoughts never stopped. What if I fell down the stairs while holding the baby? What if he hit his head? What if I fell and no one was here to help me or call 911 and he started crying? The possibilities for everything going wrong never seemed to stop and nothing ever got easier and there was no one to talk to except the woman in the yellow wallpaper. I sat alone in a house with an infant for roughly five months and felt my social skills and friendships and personal relationships slip away and it was the most alone I’ve ever felt in my life and I wanted to die except I couldn’t and wouldn’t because that would mean abandoning my child.

There’s a lot to be said for women who became mothers during the pandemic. For one, our kids are nearly feral and undersocialized because they weren’t allowed to be around other people for the first year-and-change of their lives. But what’s more is that many of these women—and I include myself in this generalization —have a very narrow view of what it means to be a mother who is supported. We may find difficulty in locating the intersection of the Venn Diagram that shows us what it means to be a mother and also a whole person, simultaneously. We don’t know what it’s like to meet mom friends at daycare/the gym/the park because we’ve been conditioned to stay away from each other. We never had a real baby shower. Our partners and significant others weren’t allowed to come to prenatal appointments and had to watch ultrasounds via Facetime. We don’t know how to reconcile our old, pre-pandemic, pre-pregnancy lives with who we’ve become as mothers. We lost our jobs, we lost our friends, we lost our place in the world and the things we used to like and do have been replaced with the endless folding of tiny t-shirts.

I can’t speak for other parents and their experiences, but I can say that pandemic parents, particularly first-time mothers, are feeling unmoored. I know that when I find anything at all that makes me feel remotely like myself, I grab onto it with two hands like it’s a piece of driftwood in the open sea and crush it into tiny pieces out of sheer desperation to feel like a person again. I’m taking solo trips to Chicago, I’m rereading old blogs, I’m reaching out to old friends. I’m grasping at hands and straws. Anything that reminds me what kind of person I am when I’m not asking a tiny version of myself to hold still so I can put on his tiny light-up shoes.

Of course he has light-up shoes: I want to give him to have the world. And I want to give him a mom who is sure of herself rather than one who is rifling through memories and personas trying to find the most appropriate one. Raising a child is hard enough without having to remember and reclaim your sense of self.