NB: Please. I know how privileged my experience of Covid is. I'm not suffering here. I know my brothers and sisters are. I don't write here, though, in order to express a need for sympathy. I write in order to find this post again, perhaps on a snowy afternoon in February 2025, when my baby is four and a half years old and taking her afternoon nap, and we've come home from a church service. I'll read this and remember.
Covid was simultaneous with my pregnancy and the birth of our daughter last fall. We had already decided that I would take a year off of teaching to be with Tess, and Jake already had a sweet deal where he worked from home four out of five days. When we look at our life changes, it's hard to see what changed because of having a child and what changed because of the pandemic.
I miss smiling at strangers, going to church, meeting for coffee, going to restaurants, birthday parties, and any parties. In fact, church is its own category of things I miss: singing together, passing babies around, standing in the kitchen and giving hugs to anyone who happens to come in, seeing kids grow up, and hearing a sermon the whole way through, without lag and with an open mind because it's not just more content—it's someone's thoughts who I know, who feels real. All of that is strictly pandemic loss.
How do I even begin to narrate the losses you experience when you have a child? Let me just say the hardest thing for me is the two together, the losses that result from having a baby during a pandemic: I can't share my baby. I can't sit in the church service while you walk around the back of the room with her, a long-held West End tradition if ever there was one.
And you can't come over for coffee and give me a hug and tell me how sweet this stage is and to soak it up because it goes by so fast. I wish you could, because while you tell me that, you could hold her in your arms and smile at her and notice the birthmark at the nape of her neck. You'd see what wonderful, toothless smiles she will give back. You'd hold her in front of the mirror and laugh as she talks to herself, delighted to find another baby who she understands exactly. Because there aren't very many babies for her to hang with just now.
When Tessa is taking one of her four naps a day, I get a few sets of 30-45 minutes to do things that require two hands. If I don't come at those time periods with a plan, it's very likely I'll mope about how many things I miss. She's napping right now. I'm moping right now.
