You have the concern of developmental issues. Is she learning as quickly as she should be? Because we are unable to give her the stimulation that she would get at daycare, especially while we’re both working full time? You worry about her constantly feeling that she’s having to battle between us being on our laptops and phones and thinking that that’s not giving her the attention, even though we’re trying to work at the same time. 

We’re both in companies that are really essential. My husband’s in logistics and so they are transporting all of the goods needed: toilet paper, food, all of that. I work for an employment law firm where everyone’s concerned about their employees, how to navigate this new world we’re in and keep their employees on payroll, and if not, how to best go about that. But that then also lends to we’re working long hours. We’re super busy throughout the day.

We’re not able to send our daughter back to daycare where she would have normally been back, probably two months ago. They’ve been taking extreme precautions.They’re doing everything by the book and we would have felt comfortable sending her back if I wasn’t pregnant. 

So because she’s home, it’s that whole other aspect of what we’re still working from home. We’ve been at this for six months, full time. More than 40 hours a week working and then having a two year old running around trying to keep her busy, keep her learning, keep her thriving, and all the while dealing with pregnancy symptoms. 

The emotional journey has been the most taxing of everything. We are in California and both of our families are in Michigan. So the last time we’ve seen family was Thanksgiving. Now I can’t travel back to everyone. She can’t see her grandparents. My grandfather actually passed away and so we were able to go to the memorial. So it has affected all personal levels of our life. 

It’s very likely that no one will be here when the baby is born. The last pregnancy, we had people in the house for four months straight, getting to know the baby, helping out. So we have very real concerns that we are going to be at this on our own even once the baby is born.  Then you worry about when will my parents get to meet the baby? Will my sisters get to meet the baby? It’s all been very, very emotional due to that. 

Then I think my daughter is also one of the more emotional aspects of it all. Prior to this, she was very outgoing. She loved being out. She loved people watching. Now she has anxietyi, when we go out where she hides behind me and she’s scared of people. Everyone has masks on so that’s also really scary for a two year old. But the emotional toll of knowing that that’s what she’s going through and that I can’t change that until this is over has been really, really hard.

We have a three bedroom house. I don’t have an office but my husband does have an office.  We had construction going on for three months. We had a pipe burst and we had to demo our entire downstairs. So we were dealing with all of that all the while. But generally, my husband’s working at a desk. I’m at the dining room table, and then she’s just back and forth. It is a daily daily test, and I will say I am handling the majority of the back and forth and trying to my husband is on the phone all day. He is managing 20 people so his job is very much on the clock. He is six to three and my job is more flexible.

I work as the marketing director at a law firm. For all intents and purposes, we are fighting for women, families and people to be able to have that home work balance. Yet with everything today, our own employees are in a very difficult situation on all fronts. They are very, very, very understanding and very, very flexible. Especially with it being an employment firm. It’s a woman owned law firm. So they understand the needs of families and they understand that we were thrown into the fire here. Initially when this all began, they asked us to set up our hours when we thought we would be most responsive. So they know this block of time that I am, quote unquote available. But if I am not responsive right in the moment, it’s not gonna be a huge deal. Then I would just work later hours or on the weekends to make up for the time. It’s felt as though I’ve been working nonstop the last six months because I don’t have a set schedule and because I’m constantly trying to make up hours throughout the day where I dedicate to my daughter because I refuse to have it be eight to ten solid hours every single day where she gets zero attention. It’s a daily struggle of figuring out when I can fit work in and whether it means I’m gonna be up at night making up for that time or whether we can all work together in this. 

She has no social interaction. She you know, I can’t she’s she’s not even two yet. I can’t put her in front of an iPad. I can’t put her in the corner and say, read this book. She needs interaction and she needs guidance. I’m very, very pro day care. I don’t pretend to know or have an educational background. I know the landmarks where she should be, but I don’t pretend to be an expert in that. I also know that she can get so much more stimulation from the social aspect of it. We’ve been looking for friends with like aged children in order to create some sort of bubble. But again, it all goes back to being pregnant and immunocompromised. And a lot of our friends have their kids back in daycare. So it’s really limited our capabilities, even just in our immediate circle of friends and support group where it’s kind of kicked us out. It’s made us even more isolated than everyone was already feeling. 

One of my close friends in particular. She was pregnant at the same time as I was with my daughter and she had a daughter that is a month older. Now we’re both pregnant again. So we’ve leaned on each other throughout all of this because we do feel it’s such a unique situation. Pregnancy is taxing to begin with but with all of these other factors it feels like an impossible task.

My girlfriend who was due about 2 weeks after me was also induced a week early, So I think there may have been a push by doctors to induce a week early.

Prior to the birth we had to figure out child care for our daughter, so we could go to the hospital and have the baby. We wanted his mom and dad to come out. We thought they would fly out a couple days before the due date and then stay a week or two. But they are in Florida and when the numbers started to climb, his mom was worried they were going to shut the airlines down. So she took it upon herself to book a ticket a full month in advance. My father-in-law was on the fence about coming out because he is in his early 70s and then at some point he just didn’t feel comfortable enough to come. So it was difficult for my mother-in-law because she couldn’t be with her husband and she was staying a whole month.

After we had the baby, my mother-in-law flew back to Florida the next day. When she got home to Florida she had to quarantine for two weeks in a wing of her house that my father-in-law sectioned off. I don’t know what we would have done without her. I am just forever grateful.

I use a wheelchair and my husband is essentially my caretaker. But the doctor’s office just wanted the patient to come for the ultrasound appointments and no one else. We were at an appointment and I actually had to argue with a staff member at this hospital. She tried to tell me that I couldn’t have my husband there. It took a phone call to both my OB’s office and ultrasound lab for them to tell her to buzz off, and that my husband could come in because he was part of my needed support for my disability. That was the most frustrating thing out of all of it. It’s just like having to fight for what is essentially a basic right.

They ended up having to retrain everybody in procedures and being tactful because of that one person. It was not pleasant at all.

I was expecting my baby in June. She was born at the end of May. And they’re like, well, you can have your husband there, but he can’t leave.

It basically happened three weeks before the pandemic really got into full swing. We saw a couple of family members, a couple of friends. But with him being premature and a newborn, we were already having to be cautious about people coming over. And then the pandemic came and all of a sudden there is a complete dead stop. It’s been really wild because I never thought my baby would be almost six months old and would still not have met his grandfather. We have friends that we consider family, who live miles down the road, who have never met our child. That’s just a crazy idea because it never was supposed to be like this
We can’t go anywhere. We can’t do anything. I just realized yesterday that in the almost six months that he’s been alive, an hour and a half is the longest I’ve been away from him. And that’s happened three times now. We’re not meant to do that as people and it makes me scared. I worry that as he gets older, will he have stranger danger? He doesn’t see other faces, is he going to be terrified every time he sees a new person because he hasn’t been introduced to other people.

He’s pretty good in math. When we were doing stuff virtually in the spring, he’s like, this is for babies. This is so boring. But, you know, we worked with him as parents. My husband’s an engineer so math is super important to him. You can imagine my kids knowing how to add and subtract and multiply is definitely one of the top things my husband wants them to be able to do. We play around in a car, “Hey, what’s five plus seven,” and he’ll give us the answer. Every night we read to our kids or have them read to us. But the writing part is more worrisome for me, for him anyway, in terms of social, emotional. 

For my daughter, we have more little girls that we know just because she’s been in school longer. So the ones that I have close relationships with, from working with them or from being in daycare, we’ll have little playdates with them because I know that they’re just as cautious as I am about the health of their kids. So for her, we’ve been able to have a couple of those playdates where she can get together with her friends, whereas we don’t know as many little boys in our neighborhood or in our area where I can be like, oh, hey, you know, do you want to have a playdate with Nathan and hang out? And so for me, that kind of breaks my heart because I know he needs that. But we don’t have access to those kids.  

Whereas in the spring when you were doing extra help running the school or you’re going to field day or you’re going to their after school picnic things where you see other parents and you see other kids and you can have those discussions like, oh, hey, we should play or hey, we should do this. We didn’t get to do that because of Covid. That was disappointing. At least they have each other to play with. I’m thankful for that, but I do think that social emotional interaction is important. 

Just seeing him interact now with baseball, has been wonderful. It just started a couple of weeks ago. He’s so excited. He’s like, I met some friends. Can we hang out and can we play with them? I’m so excited that I get to talk to this boy and this one’s a really good friend, too. Just to see him light up again about interacting with other kids just sets your heart out to know that this is really important. And to have that loss again for many months could be detrimental.