Motherhood In The Time Of Coronavirus
It’s been awhile since I last wrote. Not long after my last entry I found out I was pregnant (July 9, 2019). And earlier this month I gave birth to my beautiful daughter Audrey Laine (March 4, 2020). Let me tell you what a strange time this has been to have a newborn. At a time when most mothers would be showing off their newborn to anyone who asks, nowadays we must protect our babies from outsiders as if they pose a real and serious threat to our babies’ health. This is how we approach everyone now — as a threat. Especially now that we know COVID-19 is airborne.
I escaped the worst of it; by the time Coronavirus started ensuing mass panic I had already given birth. But I’ve watched others due later than I canceling their baby showers due to current events, or having to choose between the doula they hired and their husband as a support person due to hospital limits on visitors when giving birth. It’s downright depressing. I didn’t have a baby shower because I just don’t give a fuck, but a lot of women really look forward to the baby shower for their firstborn. You don’t get a chance to do things like that over again. And here we are having to settle for canceled gatherings and virtual alternatives in this era of social distancing.
Social distancing is such a 21st century problem I feel like. It is only through the internet that we have been able to not perish entirely as a society in the midst of this crisis. It really hit me when I selected the new “contactless” delivery option on Postmates. At long last, the option for zero human interaction has been made possible. Introverts everywhere secretly rejoice. Unfortunate that a pandemic had to be the impetus for such a welcome change, but nonetheless, this is our reality now. As if by magic, my takeout made its way to my doorstep with no human interaction required.
I didn’t take any of this seriously at first. My mom, who is brainwashed by her constant consumption of MSNBC, warned me about having a baby at this particular time. When she first talked to me about Coronavirus I told her “it’s not that bad.” I don’t keep up with the news for my own sanity, so I was shielded from the fearmongering on the airwaves. I likened it to the virus du jour of years prior — H1N1, a.k.a. Swine Flu, to name one.
It was only when the NBA canceled their entire fucking season that I started taking this Coronavirus shit seriously. And then came the stimulus checks, a real sign of the hard times that have befallen people.
The madness surrounding this pandemic is like nothing any of us have ever experienced. Outside of wartime I don’t think society has seen anything quite like it. The collective panic has led store shelves of essentials such as toilet paper to be bare. People are resorting to posting in online social communities to tip others off as to where in their neighborhood they can find items like eggs…because nobody can find them just walking into a store anymore. You have to be at the store right when they open if you want eggs, or toilet paper. You have to carefully strategize to get normal items anymore. People are prepared to basically fight to the death over the last available resources.
As a result of the hoarding, I haven’t been able to obtain normal items you might want to have when you have a newborn, like travel-size hand sanitizer for my purse…or baby wipes, which are also disappearing from store shelves since people can no longer buy toilet paper with any consistency. Wipes substitute nicely, people think. I mean, fuck the babies, right? With TP nowadays it’s catch as catch can. And it’s been that way for about a month now.
No edict to stop hoarding will even help to stop people, either. People won’t listen. At the end of the day people are out for themselves. People no longer need to hoard (did they ever, really?), but they will continue to do so because that’s what people do when resources are scarce…but resources won’t stop being scarce until people stop hoarding, see how that works? It seems as if people just continue to hoard while hoping others are dumb enough to stop hoarding to further enable their own hoarding. I don’t even know what people’s mindsets are and I’m not going to pretend to know.
Ryan regrets bringing a child into this chaos. (Sorry, should have planned for this when I got pregnant last year…) I don’t think it’s THAT deep, though. This isn’t genocide. This is just something we’re all collectively surviving in our own way, each day, as best we know how. We have gotten through more challenging times than these.
