“You See Your Smallness”: On Giving Birth in a Pandemic

In the days after my son’s birth, I started fielding questions from other friends, and friends of friends, who were expecting their own babies in the coming days and weeks. They had seen my pictures on social media, had seen that we were healthy and well and bearing up okay with a new baby in quarantine, and were eager for reassurance. What had it been like to give birth at the height of the pandemic? they would ask. What were the protocols? Was it okay? Was it scary?

In the moments when little Hal was sleeping, or nursing, I tried to put together a sort of memo. “Your Corona Baby,” I wrote in the subject line. I felt presumptuous, but if it could be helpful to anyone else, it seemed worth doing. Still, after that, I wondered where to begin. The chaos of the maternity ward? Or the nurses marching for adequate gear on the street outside? Or the ever-rising death toll all around us at this, the virus’s peak? While I’d been giving birth, and during the few hours I spent on the neonatal ward, directly above a temporary field hospital in Central Park that had been erected just days before, I would later learn that a friend’s father had abruptly declined and died, alone on a ventilator, as had the priest who baptized my nieces. It didn’t seem like helpful information.

It was hard to know what to say, because what I knew—the only thing I knew—was that it was impossible to generalize or plan; that things had indeed felt chaotic and a bit scary; and that it was obvious that no one, from governor to administrator to nurse, really knew what was happening from day to day. The night we went to the hospital, a new disinfectant protocol meant that beds were scarce; we stayed in the waiting room overnight until one opened up at 4:30 a.m. The labor itself was long and rough, the epidural ran out, the staff was shorthanded. I was tested for the virus, but everyone’s test results were lost or delayed for a day and as a result the personnel carried on as though we had all tested positive. (Those who did would be quarantined from their babies for two weeks.) I gave birth in a mask and the nurses limited their visits to rooms to preserve their PPE. After the baby was born, partners had to leave within two hours.

Instead, I tried to answer their questions. “No, I wouldn’t bother with a labor gown,” I said, thinking of the nightgown and slippers I’d thrown away rather than bring them home from the hospital. “No, there probably weren’t private rooms available”—here I remembered the young Orthodox roommate I’d had, whose complicated birth had kept her in the hospital for a week, and who cried because she missed her husband. “It will be okay,” I finally wrote at the top of the memo. “And better than okay.”

Perhaps naively, I had never dreaded giving birth, but I hadn’t romanticized it either. Long before the coronavirus had infected its first host, talk of meticulously choreographed birth plans and playlists had stirred something superstitious in me: On my chart, at my instruction, the doctor had written “whatever keeps the baby safe.” Pessimism is usually a safe bet—at best, you’re pleasantly surprised, at worst, proven right—but in hindsight, I might have added a few things to my birth plan: N95 masks for the nurses, say, or a supply of bouillon cubes to drink (the hospital was out). Or anesthesiologists.

When COVID-19 hit New York, my pregnancy remained low on my list of worries. Indeed, I approached the whole thing with great bravado. I told myself that, in some ways, it was a good time to have a baby: According to the many articles my concerned parents and in-laws had sent me, infants are no more vulnerable to the virus than other people, and perhaps less so than most. And the small, tangible challenges—getting to Mt. Sinai hospital from our apartment on the West Side, securing a bed, bringing the baby home—would be a blessed distraction from the horror unfolding on the other side of the hospital, from the anxiety of the quarantined neighbors whose coughing I could hear across the air shaft, from the financial insecurity of the coming months.

The truth is, I found these real, small problems a relief, and not just from the news of the pandemic. There had been a time, not long before, when a stranger’s interest in my pregnancy—really, the fact that anyone could ascertain anything just by looking at my body—had made me both bashful and furious. I knew I was fortunate. I tussled with doctors over elective procedures that offered questionable benefits. I hated the “better safe than sorry” rationale—that one morning’s high blood sugar was reason enough to induce labor, or that I should go to the E.R. if I accidentally ingested a slice of salami. As an expectant mother, I was assumed to suffer from a guilty conscience and could be sold anything from a Swiss stretch-mark oil to a thousand-dollar sound machine. The whole situation reminded me of nothing so much as being a teenager, simultaneously resentful and ashamed, angry and inferior at once, and utterly unable to master my feelings—not a good look in someone of “advanced maternal age.”

“Strollers!” I ranted to my husband more than once. “Strollers! It’s like everything I hate at once: vehicles, and competitive parenting, and ugliness, and comparison shopping! I hate talking about it!” (Who these legions of hypothetical people trying to force me to discourse on strollers were, I could not now say.) And don’t even get me started on the mandatory infant car seat we needed for the 10-minute cab ride home; to pre-quarantine me, the requirement felt Kafkaesque for storage-challenged apartment dwellers who couldn’t drive.

Back then, I’d self-righteously thought I would never put a picture of my baby on social media. I’d even told our parents about this ban; I said I didn’t want to disseminate his image without his consent, and—perhaps more to the point—was privately haunted by vague images of slack-jawed newborns posed in pea pods, lolling around sign boards bearing their ages, bedecked with cutesy hashtags.

Then the virus came to New York—and, as if it needs saying, everything changed. All at once, all those worries and vague anxieties—about my identity, and the big strollers, and the fancy bassinet we couldn’t afford, and how to deal with my mom’s opinions about sleep training—receded like so many nonessential personnel. “Feelings,” the governor said in one of his daily briefings, “are a luxury we cannot afford.”

There were enough real things to think about, and come to terms with, and an ever-shifting set of data. Our families wouldn’t be allowed at the hospital, we were told early on; well, that would have its compensations—it would just be the three of us. A few days later we realized that, being older and vulnerable, they shouldn’t travel to New York City at all—something that would have been unthinkable a month earlier. Well, okay, we’d get them on Zoom and Skype. There’d be no one to help us out at home? We’d learn fast, and after all, it wasn’t the worst time to be sequestered. Would my husband be allowed in the hospital? Yes, we were told—then no. Well, I rationalized, it’s how all our grandmothers had done it. When we realized the baby’s basket wouldn’t be arriving in time, we fit up a drawer with a folded blanket. No stroller? Well, we had nowhere to go anyway. “We’ll figure it out,” became our household mantra. For the first time, I felt—instead of just knowing—how truly lucky I was.

This sense only grew in the ensuing days, as my baby’s birthday drew closer and the situation around us worsened, no longer a distant hypothetical or a social whirl of remote dance parties and bean-cooking tutorials, but fatalities, grim projections, and tangible fear and anger on the street. Three days before my induction date, the governor signed an executive order forcing hospitals to allow a birth partner in labor. My husband and I were relieved, but increasingly, in the face of the intolerable burden placed on hospitals, our individual wishes felt less and less important. I asked the doctor if he should stay home but was told no; because there were not enough tests available to screen partners, and inadequate protective gear, he’d just have to remain in the room.

Like everyone’s, my pre-quarantine life felt increasingly remote and absurd. I remembered how weird I’d been about going to a prenatal exercise class six weeks or so ago. It had somehow embarrassed me to be in a room full of other women who were automatically supposed to share my concerns because we happened to be having babies in the same school year. “I felt like I was in The Handmaid’s Tale,” I texted another expecting friend at the time. In the days leading up to my due date, I found I loved seeing other pregnant women on the other side of the doctor’s waiting room—although for the most part our visits were staggered, and partners had long since been banned from ultrasounds. I started texting and emailing more with other pregnant friends, trying to reassure them. It wasn’t because the culture fetishized some intangible ideal of femininity, or whatever I’d worried about a few short weeks before; it was because, like it or not, we were all going through something together. Where once we’d vented about inappropriate things strangers had said to us about circumcision and breastfeeding and the ubiquity of car-strewn infant fashions, now we wondered whether scheduled inductions were less of a burden on the hospital’s resources than a natural birth.

One thing people like to say, now that our baby is safely born, is that he and other children his age will have incredible birth stories one day. I guess so, but when I think about those hours and days, it’s not a good story I see. A good story is neat, and requires a protagonist, and situations like this do not end neatly, nor do they make you feel like you are important; instead, you see your smallness and insignificance, and you recognize you are caught up in something much larger. Harold was one baby born during a horrible time, and ours was a lucky case: few complications, a healthy birth, and the ability to move on quickly and give our bed to someone else who needed it more. At the same time, I found myself glad to share the baby’s picture: I was happy to have something hopeful to show people, and was overwhelmed by their interest and kindness.

Indeed, friends, family, even the strangers I’d resisted so much, became a lifeline. How, I wondered later, could I have ever wanted my husband to stay “on this side of the curtain” in the delivery room through those scary hours and days of labor? How could I have wanted to keep the joy of a healthy baby’s birth so much to myself? Those of us giving birth now would be sent home to quarantine with our babies, after a quick lesson in feeding and swaddling, and the messages, the gifts of food, the interest and phone calls would get us through.

“Don’t be afraid,” I wrote in my memo, as the baby slept in his basket by my feet. “And don’t order the oatmeal for breakfast; it’s like gruel and doesn’t come with any dairy, sugar, or raisins etc.” I tried to think of upbeat, helpful things to say. I recommended packing light. I told them to bring a phone charger so they could send pictures and videos to their families. “Bring earplugs” was one item. “Don’t worry about a cute baby outfit.” I spoke highly of the surprisingly delicious birthday cupcake the nurses gave each of us and said I thought the solitude of quarantine had helped to keep the baby calm.

And as I wrote, I remembered other things from those few days: the maternity nurse, Priscilla, telling us about her love of the Y.A. writer Tomi Adeyemi, whose work had inspired her to follow her dreams of becoming a midwife. Gemma, who took over from her, exulting in her daughter’s full scholarship to college. Our doctor, showing us pictures of the teenage daughter whom she hadn’t seen in weeks—she was protecting her family from exposure—and would not see for weeks more. Sandie, the night nurse, who, with her E.R. nurse husband, was trying to homeschool four children. (“This is rough stuff!” she consoled the baby when he screamed at having his little shirt changed.) The lactation consultant who told me they had “the happiest job in the hospital.” The roar that went up under our window at 7 p.m. when the hospital shifts changed over. The fact that, after all, no one even checked to see if we had a car seat because they were so eager to get us out, and how the taxi driver who drove us home kept saying, “It’s a blessing!” with tears in his eyes, and who didn’t socially distance nearly enough. These are the first people their baby would meet, and there was a lot to be said for that. “Please don’t hesitate to reach out,” I wrote, and sent it. I felt a little silly, but what did that matter?

Read more from Vogue’s coronavirus coverage:

What to know about the coronavirus pandemic today.

How to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, from experts.

Why social distancing is good for you and your community.

How designers are sharing messages of hope.

The best at-home workouts for the age of the coronavirus.

Originally Appeared on Vogue