5 years ago everything changed

On becoming a mom during the pandemic

I’ve been devouring stories and retrospectives about the five-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic.

Somewhere around 2022 or 2023, I was pitching COVID reflection pieces, and I kept getting the same response from editors: “People don’t want to read about COVID. They want to move forward, not look back. They want to forget.”

But I am a memoirist—forgetting isn’t in my nature. Even if I weren’t so inclined toward nostalgia and rumination, the pandemic was a chasm in my life.

Externally, it prompted a move from Brooklyn to the tiny town of Frenchtown, New Jersey, on the Delaware River. I became a mom. Internally, my brain/heart rearranged itself.

My pandemic baby was born on April 9, 2020, just as things were getting deeply scary and surreal. My restaurant-reviewing gigs vanished as restaurants shuttered. Tony, who had worn a suit every day (or most days) at the office, was suddenly working from home in his coziest sweats. My phone buzzed constantly with friends checking in, panicking. Were they going to shut down the subways? The hospitals?

I would place my hands on my stomach and feel the palpitations, the shifting and stirring of the person growing inside me. I’d find a sizeable mound and wonder—head or butt? My baby would hiccup, my belly seizing just a little, a small tickle, and I’d be overcome with delight and awe. It doesn’t matter that we are all born this way—it is a sci-fi wonder, how I brewed a whole person in my body. (Two, now.)

At Café Eloise, the coffee shop next door to us in Brooklyn, my barista/owner/friend had switched to selling coffee through the window, but she came out to see me. “Hello, baby,” she said to my stomach. “Let’s just stay in there a little longer until this whole COVID thing blows over. Please and thank you.” She handed me my latte—on the house.

I remember walking to my prenatal yoga class on Franklin Avenue sometime in March. Outside, the first buds formed on the trees. Inside, the headache-inducing smell of Clorox wipes and hand sanitizer. We set up our mats as far apart as possible. No one told us to do this—we just understood. The overwhelm in people’s eyes. The yoga teacher, a mother of four who could twist her body into any intricate pretzel, asked us to check in before we started moving. Everyone was scared. One mother-to-be, who worked in an emergency room, bawled; things were getting awful. I cried, too, as I stretched my hamstrings and raised my hands into the air. After, I felt cleansed.

I went home and told Tony how grateful I was to have connected with those women—those strong women navigating pregnancy as this mysterious disease turned into a global crisis. We were in it together.

I remember one of those first days of both of us working from home in our Brooklyn apartment, just as things were starting to get weird. Between Zoom meetings and copywriting assignments, I finished setting up the nursery. We had a teal crib and stick-on wallpaper of hot air balloons floating across the world. We didn’t know the gender, but I was convinced we were having a boy.

“Let’s go out for dinner—we’ve been home all day,” I suggested, just days (hours?) before there were no more dinners out to go to. The appetizer we shared was so generous with its fat oyster mushrooms I nearly cried with joy. I can’t remember what else we ate. The grocery store was out of random things—pasta, onions, anything that came in cans. The last time I had seen shelves and shelves so starkly empty was when I was heping to open a store. The next day, I bought expensive short ribs and braised them for hours.

My parents asked if we wanted to come out to Frenchtown for a few days, maybe a week. There would be more space for us to work. Ace could go to the dog park, and we could walk along the Delaware & Raritan Canal Path, the historic towpath that runs from Trenton to New Brunswick. (Now, I walk Ace on that path multiple times a day.)

It didn’t take long to decide. We packed backpacks with our laptops and a few changes of clothes.

My midwife said she could do my next appointment virtually. The system broke, and I sat on hold for an hour, waiting for her. After 90 minutes, I gave up. She called me breathless hours later. “Everything is wild,” she said. We kept repeating this to each other.

She told me the rumors were true: no one could be with me at the hospital when I gave birth. (Just a week ago, she had assured me that Labor and Delivery was a sacred space, that I would be with Tony and my doula, no matter what.) But now, as a COVID precaution, there were no exceptions.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This policy is bigger than us.”

And then my tears came—fat, fast, desperate.

Before this pregnancy, I had a miscarriage—proof that we have so little control over life. But we had done so much to prepare for this birth. I had switched from my no-nonsense OB/GYN to the Park Slope Midwives, who treated the process with more of a human touch. We took birth classes at Birth Day Presence. We found the most amazing doulas. We toured the hospital. We planned our after-delivery meal: a seafood tower and spicy margaritas with salted rims.

None of that mattered now. The world was imploding.

My dad drove us back to Brooklyn in his little red Chevy Volt. There were no cars on the streets of Manhattan. No sound but the hum of the radio and the thump of my heartbeat. We watered the thirsty plants. We filled the car with what we thought we’d need for the baby: a sling, a changing pad, impossibly little clothes. I stared at all the baby stuff—gifts, hand-me-downs, supplies. And, as usual, I cried.

I am so grateful to the doctors who agreed to deliver my baby. I was 36 weeks pregnant when I met them for the first time. At the birth, the doulas couldn’t be there, but Tony could. (They offered to support the birth via FaceTime, but I didn’t want to be on the phone in labor.) We couldn’t leave the hospital room. I couldn’t take off my mask, even when I was throwing up (an impossible tast). Nothing went according to my birth plan. We had an emergency C-section; I went into the fierce grip of fear and unravelling and lots of drugs. We had a healthy, beautiful baby.

Her cries were bigger than all my fear.

She was a girl. We named her Simone, which means hearkening—listen.

Everything kept changing. We stopped leaving groceries on the porch. There were vaccines. Restaurants opened, with outdoor seating and plexiglass partitions.

The Canal Path, which had closed when all state parks shut down, reopened. I spent my postpartum days walking and walking, Simone’s soft head on my chest, her heavy body sleeping in the carrier. The Delaware River sparkled in the sunshine.

We bought a car. I had a small anxiety attack at the Volvo dealership—I had never been away from Simone for so long, and my breasts were literally exploding.

A year later, we bought a house in Frenchtown.

I learned what doomscrolling was.

I learned about the physicality of exhaustion—the way it made my limbs heavy and my head feel stuffed with cotton.

I learned what people meant when they said that when you have a baby, your heart now lives outside of yourself.

I learned why people resort to clichés when talking about parenthood.

I transformed.

I survived.

I loved so big.

I survived.

Here I am delirious with drugs and bliss.

5 years ago next month.

xo,

Hannah