My Slightly Unreal Pandemic Pregnancy

On March 12, 2020, at 2:15 P.M., after Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O. director-general, officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, I texted my husband, Caldwell, “You should maybe try to leave work a little early today so we can go to the grocery store. Seems like this whole thing is starting to get serious.” I quickly followed up with: “Or does that seem crazy?” On March 19th, California went into lockdown. On April 4th, I found out I was pregnant.

When we went to buy the pregnancy test at the Glendale CVS, in Los Angeles, we were greeted by a good omen: there, on the otherwise decimated shelves of the paper-goods section, was a single six-pack of Scott toilet paper. I could tell this was a good omen because it stood out against the overwhelming backdrop of bad omens. A large sign at the entrance warned shoppers to stay six feet apart and not to enter if they were experiencing symptoms of the coronavirus. A smaller sign, fresh off the printer, insisted that masks be worn at all times (per the C.D.C.’s revised guidance issued the day before), with a handwritten addendum stating: “No mask sold here. Out of stock.” Beneath that, someone had angrily scribbled: “How can we wear masks if there are no masks???”—with the question marks curving down the side of the paper in a poorly planned fizzle of fury.

Approximately sixteen minutes and seven glasses of water later, I was pregnant. That evening, as I performed my nightly ritual of scrolling through news alerts, a CNN headline jumped out: “That coronavirus baby boom? Experts say it’s unlikely.” The article quoted Kenneth Johnson, a professor of sociology and a demographer at the University of New Hampshire, who explained, “There’s no way the number of births is going to go up. . . . This is not the kind of environment in which people say, ‘Let’s bring a child into the world now.’ ”

Three weeks later, just after business hours on a Friday, I had reason to believe that I was having a miscarriage. The timing meant that when I called my doctor—a doctor with whom I’d scheduled an appointment in two weeks, but hadn’t actually met—a flustered night-shift doctor answered instead.

“What exactly are your symptoms?” he asked.

I told him there was blood.

“How much blood?”

“I mean, it’s not a horror movie, but considering the fetus is only supposed to be about the size of a raspberry, it seems like a lot,” I said, suddenly feeling a need to make this doctor laugh.

“O.K., well . . . ” The sounds of paper being shuffled or rapidly skimmed came through the phone. “Under normal circumstances, I’m supposed to tell you to go to the emergency room, but with COVID and all . . . ” He trailed off.

“Right. COVID,” I said, just to say something.

“If you’re not in significant pain, it’s probably not an ectopic pregnancy, so I’d say you should just wait until Monday, and your doctor can squeeze you in here to see what’s up.”

“Just . . . wait?” I asked.

“I’m sorry. I know this isn’t ideal. If things get worse or you start to experience a worrying amount of pain, go to the emergency room.”

“Is there a way things won’t get worse?” For some reason, I laughed as I asked this, but it wasn’t as satisfying as getting him to laugh.

“There are a lot of things that can cause bleeding in early pregnancy, and not all of them are miscarriage.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh”—as if I hadn’t already Googled every possible non-devastating reason for bleeding.

“But,” the doctor added, “if you are miscarrying, there’s nothing you can do to stop it, so just try to stay comfortable until you can find out what’s happening on Monday.”

“Cool.” Then, one last attempt: “It’s like Schrödinger’s baby.”

That got the laugh. It helped a little.

On Monday morning, after a weekend of rewatching three seasons of “Parks and Recreation” while scrolling through nightmare pictures of bloody toilet bowls on BabyCenter forums, I went to the doctor. The receptionist scanned my temperature and told Caldwell that he couldn’t come in to the appointment with me. “Things have gotten worse in recent weeks, so we’ve had to change our policy,” she said, kindly adding, “He’s still allowed to wait in the waiting room, though.” I told Caldwell that I would text him the moment I had answers.

Inside the exam room, I sat alone for ten minutes, pantsless but wearing a mask, until the doctor entered. I had arbitrarily picked this doctor, whom I’ll call Dr. T, from a list of names on Blue Cross Blue Shield’s terrible Web site, so it was a pleasant surprise when she turned out to have the exact balance of no-nonsense directness and prudish awkwardness that I look for in a gynecologist.

“I’m sure you’ve been anxious about this all weekend, so let’s just dive right in,” she said as she lubed up the ultrasound wand. Then, “Scooch your, um, bottom forward a bit.” Five seconds later, a fast, muffled wub-wub, wub-wub sound filled the room. Dr. T pointed to a flickering black-and-white pebble onscreen.

“There’s the fetus.”

I stared. “So I didn’t have a miscarriage?” This was a stupid question. I was aware that it was stupid as I asked it, but I’d spent the previous sixtyish hours suspended between two duelling realities—baby, no baby—and needed things spelled out for me.

“No.” And then, just as a definitive projection for the rest of my life, or at least the rest of this year, started to form, she followed up, “But the fetus is a little small, and unexplained bleeding in early pregnancy is always a worry, so you should come back for your previously scheduled appointment in two weeks and we’ll see if everything is still progressing. At this point, I’d say we’re fifty-fifty.”

Then, with what would have probably been a sympathetic smile if I could have seen her mouth, but was instead just a sympathetic eye crinkle, Dr. T added, “I know that’s not exactly good news.”

“Fifty-fifty,” I repeated. “I guess it’s equally as good as it is bad.”

I felt pretty proud of this gently fatalistic response when it formed in my head, but the calm delivery that I was going for didn’t mix well with Dr. T’s decision to pull the ultrasound wand out mid-sentence. Instead of conveying wry stoicism, I said the word “bad” very loudly, then let out an exhale-laugh that refogged my glasses.

After Dr. T left the exam room, I fished my phone out of my pants to text Caldwell: “Still in the game. For now.”

Two weeks later, Dr. T upgraded her assessment from fifty-fifty to December 11th. I had a due date, plus a shiny ribbon of sonogram printouts to show Caldwell.

As we walked to our car, he did some math. “If we have another few weeks before it’s safe to start telling people, maybe the pandemic will be under control enough by then that we could do a little trip to tell our families in person.”

I was more realistic. “End of May? Flying to New York might still be a little iffy then, but Nashville should definitely be doable.”

After all, the U.S. had just hit a million COVID-19 cases. How could it be allowed to get worse than that?

A couple days after California’s two-week, then six-week, lockdown was extended indefinitely, I was skimming a pregnancy-tracking e-mail from one of the many “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” Web sites that had somehow acquired my address, seemingly upon conception. It warned that, at week ten, I should expect to find that my blouses would be a little hard to button.

“Do you even own any blouses?” Caldwell asked, scanning my outfit: sweatpants with failing elastic and a ratty T-shirt silk-screened with some inside joke from his college comedy troupe that I very much never wanted to have explained to me.

Clearly, expectations needed to be adjusted. If there were a “What to Expect When You’re Expecting During an Unprecedented Global Pandemic,” the weekly e-mail updates might include stuff like:

“At week ten of pregnancy—and week eight of quarantine—you might feel the urge to bake. Knowing this urge to bake is a bad idea, you might try to hedge your bets by baking scones, pastries that, at their best, are still pretty dry and bad. This is a totally great idea! But you should prepare yourself for the possibility that all the grocery stores will be out of normal flour, and, when you try to substitute almond flour, you’ll end up with gritty lumps of chocolate-chip butter sand that make you gag whenever you think about them.”

“At week eleven, your local drugstore may run out of your preferred laundry-detergent brand, and you may say, ‘Whatever, I’ll just get Tide!’ And then, after washing all the clothes and towels and sheets, you may realize that the smell of Tide makes you even sicker than the thought of those crappy scones. Unfortunately, the only way to remedy this situation will be to go to a different drugstore in search of the correct laundry detergent while trying not to throw up inside the face mask you just washed in putrid Tide.”

“At week twelve, once the scones and smells have been banished, and you go nowhere, see no one, and are never subjected to objectionable outside stimuli, you may end up not feeling pregnant at all. In fact, you may feel so not pregnant that you spend all your time Googling chromosomal abnormalities that could make it possible that even if you aren’t miscarrying, you also aren’t growing anything that will ever turn into an actual baby. You may try to tell your husband about what you’ve learned, and he’ll likely tell you to stop Googling things like that. He’ll be right, but this response may do nothing to help with the feeling of disconnection you have from your baby, your body, your sense of self, and the distant, inaccessible world around you. If you experience any of this, it’s important to remember that it’s perfectly normal because absolutely none of this is normal.”

Two months of lockdown and social distancing had significantly lowered the standard for what could reasonably be deemed conversation, or even things that are worth saying out loud to another human. So I was excited to tell our families the good news about my pregnancy over Zoom. At least, I was for the first two, maybe three, calls. By the seventh, saying the phrase “We’re having a baby” held roughly the same excitement as a tip about a new way to cook chickpeas. Everyone was happy to have something to put on the calendar, but, in terms of providing an instant solution to the tedium of quarantine, the future kid was offering very little.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” my mother-in-law asked (approximately three times over the course of the first call and then no fewer than twelve times in texts the following week). “Anything at all. Please let me know! <3 <3 <3 !!!!” A few days later, we received a care package with one of those Sophie giraffe toys and some extremely crushed homemade cookies. My mother decided to take the urge to act a step further. “I bought a one-way ticket to L.A. that gets in December 7th,” she texted, before adding, “Even if this pandemic is somehow still not under control, I’ll wear a full hazmat suit on the plane. But I’ll be there, come hell or high water.”

“Don’t worry. There’s no way this won’t all be over by December,” I responded.

On July 24th, I pointed my phone camera at the ultrasound screen so that Caldwell could watch from the waiting room as Dr. T walked us through the twenty-week anatomy scan.

“And there’s the labia,” she declared, without preamble or a pause to build suspense. I find the entire concept of gender-reveal parties to be tacky and humiliating, but I will admit that I was hoping for something a little more climactic as Dr. T typed the words “IT’S A GIRL!” across the screen. Though I suppose the exclamation point counted for something.

Caldwell texted the update to his family from the waiting room. When we got home, there was a package from his mother containing two firecracker-type tubes, one labelled “It’s a girl!” and one “It’s a boy!,” which, when activated, would shoot out pink or blue confetti, respectively. It seemed Caldwell’s mother was also hoping for a little more fanfare.

“I guess we could still send my mom a video of us shooting off the pink one?” Caldwell suggested, without enthusiasm.

“I don’t want to spend the rest of this pandemic cleaning up little pieces of pink confetti,” I said. And that was the end of our gender-reveal celebration.

On September 5th, a smoke machine at a gender-reveal party in San Bernardino County malfunctioned and started a fire that burned for two months and destroyed over twenty-two thousand acres.

“Maybe ‘and there’s the labia!’ was a pretty good gender-reveal party after all,” Caldwell said, as we reviewed Wirecutter’s list of the best air purifiers.

On the evening of September 18th, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and there was an earthquake in L.A. Add these events to the raging wildfires, soaring temperatures, the air quality that the app I’d downloaded deemed “very unhealthy,” and, oh yeah, the relentlessly spreading airborne virus, and it was starting to feel very possible that the world was ending. “At least you’re not doing something insane like bringing a new life into this hellscape,” my brother joked. So what was the solution to poisonous air making me even more trapped in my house than I already was? How to prepare for the apocalypse? Obsessive nesting, of course.

If the outside world insisted on going to shit, I was going to do everything in my power to make the inside of my home as nurturing and safe as possible. But what I didn’t know about baby items—something the online shops and Instagram mommy influencers must carefully crop out—is that every baby thing comes engulfed in dire warning labels. WARNING: suffocation hazard; WARNING: amputation risk; WARNING: this product is coated in flame retardants that can be harmful to brain development; WARNING: this item is NOT coated in flame retardants and is therefore very flammable—keep away from open flames. Each beauty-pageant sash of warnings filled me with fresh worries.

“What if the picture we have hanging next to the crib falls off the wall during an earthquake and crushes the baby’s skull?” I asked Caldwell at 6 A.M., when he was not actually awake and I’d been up Googling gruesome scenarios for two hours.

Here’s what else I Googled:

“SIDS rates”

“What is SIDS”

“Mask for COVID and smoke”

“Can baby too big come out”

“Presidential election polling”

“Postpartum incontinence how common”

“Presidential election polling 2016 vs 2020”

“Prolapsed vagina”

“What happens if electoral college tie”

“Diastasis recti”

“Qanon”

“Qanon JFK Jr”

“How become Canadian resident”

“How get baby passport”

By mid-October, I was an expert on every possible worst-case scenario, and, somehow, each worry led to more worries—infinite fractals of fear. There was no end to the things that could potentially go wrong, and by bringing a child into this world I was just setting her and myself up for a lifetime of potential disaster and misery.

“Oh, wait, what about, like, a tapestry or hanging-quilt thing?” I asked Caldwell after another early-morning terror spiral. “Then we’d only have to worry about suffocation instead of smashed skulls.”

At my doctor’s appointment that month, I asked Dr. T if there were any special exercises I could do to stop my ab muscles from splitting apart.

“If they’re splitting, you probably can’t do anything to stop it. But,” she added, “almost anything can be fixed after the fact.”

By mid-November, two things were glaringly apparent: my pregnant belly, and that the so-called “curve” had not been flattened. Case numbers in Los Angeles were climbing, and, with Americans gearing up to celebrate Thanksgiving by partaking in the grand American traditions of overeating and selfish idiocy, the situation was only expected to get worse.

On November 21st, I called my mother to tell her that she should probably cancel her trip out here. A few weeks before this, she had dislocated her ankle and was hobbling around on crutches, but still intended to make the trek out to L.A. She had sworn to come despite “hell or high water,” but those things aren’t contagious diseases that are especially harmful to people over sixty-five. She took the disappointment better than I thought she would. “I’m thinking about buying you an iPad so I can have a continuous FaceTime with the baby,” she texted shortly after we got off the phone. “Would that be helpful?”

For my part, I had been skeptical that my mother’s presence immediately after I gave birth would be helpful, but the moment I got off the phone with her I burst into tears.

Caldwell was horrified. “Is there anything I can do?”

Is there anything I can do? After months of asking and being asked some version of this well-meaning but useless question over and over, I finally realized that there was really only one answer: “Don’t get COVID.” That was it. That was the entire point of the lockdown, of these months of cancelled plans, lost employment, and missed family. It was all to keep people from getting and spreading COVID. And it just wasn’t fucking working.

We had now reached twelve million cases, over a quarter of a million deaths, and tens of millions of people whose lives were permanently upended by the loss of livelihoods, homes, and loved ones. Even as I was blubbering, I was aware of the fact that I had fared infinitely better than many others during this crisis, and that, as a healthy white woman with medical insurance and a loving partner, I was experiencing a privileged pregnancy.

But, still, I wanted my mom. And there was nothing I could do about it.

The morning of December 20th, nine days past my due date and thirty-six hours after my contractions had started, the contraction-timing app that Caldwell had downloaded said we were finally allowed to go to the hospital.

Upon arrival, Caldwell was sent to a little waiting room with other sweaty, bag-laden dads-to-be, and I shuffled off to get a COVID test and have a nurse check the progress of my labor.

“Sorry this is so invasive,” the cheerful intake nurse said while swabbing my nose. Notably, she had not offered a similar apology moments before, when she was poking my cervix. “I suspect it’s only going to get worse from here,” I said. I had been trying to make a joke, but, as it turned out, I was providing an accurate forecast of the next fourteen and a half hours. One of the things that all the pregnancy-advice books tell you to do is to put together a “birth plan,” which is essentially a delusional itinerary that you write for how you want this event you’ve never experienced to go, which you then give to doctors and nurses who have assisted on thousands of births, in order to make them hate you. Based on my relentless research and readings of books and blogs written by doulas and crunchy moms, the safest, least perineally destructive way to give birth is without any drugs or medical augmentation: “naturally.”

Naturally, this plan turned to shit almost immediately. I had spent the past few weeks worrying that Caldwell or I would somehow test positive for COVID at the hospital and that I’d be banished from the standard Labor and Delivery room and forced to give birth alone in a room that looked like a set from “E.T.,” but I barely had time to celebrate my negative COVID-test result before the nurse told me my contractions had slowed and I’d need to either agree to take the contraction-increasing drug Pitocin, or go home and wait for them to naturally speed up again. Pitocin was very much not part of the “natural” birth plan, but I had gone nine months with only one thing on my calendar, and then another nine days with that one thing still not happening, so I agreed to the Pitocin.

“But I’d like to hold off on the epidural,” I said. “See if I really need it.”

A friend of mine once told me she’d heard that waiters and waitresses at Disneyland are specifically forbidden from warning customers when they’re in the process of ordering too much food. Even if you’re doing something idiotic like ordering more than one Monte Cristo, the most they’re allowed to do is try to silently convey with their eyes that you’re making a big mistake. With three-quarters of her face covered by a mask and the rest by a face shield, the look the new nurse assigned to my care gave me still should have been enough to let me know that not immediately getting an epidural after the Pitocin started was a Monte Cristo-sized mistake.

One of the things that proponents of unmedicated childbirth like to remind you is that childbirth is a natural process. Birth is a part of nature. That’s all well and good, but viruses, wildfires, and earthquakes are natural, too. “Natural” isn’t inherently positive. As I was reminded after two hours of convulsing in agony, nature can be a real dick.

When I finally gave in and summoned the anesthesiologist, he directed Caldwell to stand behind a curtain while the epidural was administered. “We usually have partners leave the room for this because it can be upsetting to see the size of the needle,” he explained, “but because of COVID . . .” It seemed to me that seeing a big needle was pretty far down the list of horrifying sights that awaited Caldwell, but I didn’t bother to point that out as the needle went in.

With my birth plan in the toilet, I decided to focus on one source of tremendous anxiety that I still thought I could possibly control: sandwiches.

The hospital’s COVID-19 restrictions meant that Caldwell and I were not allowed to bring in outside food, and, as I’d learned from a middle-of-the-night stress Google, the hospital’s kitchen closed at 7 P.M. So I had a coronavirus word problem on my hands: If the kitchen closes at 7 P.M., and I’m six centimeters dilated at 3 P.M., what are the chances I’ll give birth in time to order the turkey sandwich I’ve been dreaming about for half my pregnancy?

Caldwell cracked it. “Why don’t we just order a sandwich now and save it for later?” Genius.

I was full of drugs, and I had a sandwich and a baby on the way. Things couldn’t have been going better when the nurse told me that it was time to start pushing.

Almost immediately after what I thought was a pretty good first push, seven doctors and nurses came pouring into the room. Two consulted the fetal monitor, one whipped off my face mask and replaced it with an oxygen mask, another tipped me onto my side, two consulted with the nurse—I heard the words “heart” and “distress”—and the last one attached a new bag to my I.V.

“This is the most crowded room we’ve been in in months,” Caldwell said. I laughed as I started shaking.

“The shaking is a normal response to the medicine we just gave you to stop your contractions and give baby a chance to recover. It seems baby’s heart didn’t like all that pushing,” the nurse fiddling with my I.V. explained to me as though I, myself, were a baby.

When Dr. T finally arrived, she was wearing a denim jacket and a jaunty backpack, like she was an old friend coming to hang out after school.

“Oh, O.K.,” she said, after talking to the nurse and consulting the fetal monitor. Then she turned to me. “This is gonna be fine.”

And, as though her declaration had the power to make it so, two magnificent things happened at once: the baby’s heart rate levelled out, and my sandwich arrived.

Across the hospital room was a bassinet with a blanket and a little hat waiting for a baby. All I had to do was get the baby out of my body and into that little hat. After months of complex calamities that I was powerless to do anything about, this task felt refreshingly easy.

Three hours of pushing later, when I was beginning to lose steam, a phone started ringing. It was a landline, so, with mild confusion, everyone in the room just tuned it out, as you do with a ringing landline in 2020. But it kept ringing until a passing nurse answered.

“Hello?” She listened, confused, for a long beat before turning to Caldwell. “It’s your mother.”

I thought about my mother-in-law sitting at home at 11 P.M. in Nashville, getting so desperate for news of her first grandchild that she called the hospital until she was successfully redirected to the landline in our hospital room. I thought about this and it made me laugh for the next half hour of pushing until the fetal monitor started to beep again.

Dr. T calmly explained that the baby’s heart rate had dropped again and she would need to use a vacuum to help get her out fast. This was another labor intervention from the Hell No, Absolutely Not list.

“Fuck it. Vacuum away.”

Most people will claim that the day their child was born was the best day of their life. It’s the standard opinion of all parents who love their children, and it’s patently untrue. As far as days I’ve experienced go, this was by far the most frightening, embarrassing, exhausting, frustrating, excruciatingly painful one ever. And yet, in the moment this furiously frowning baby was finally freed from my body and shifted from a hypothetical wish to a real lump of life, the entire awful day was instantly rewritten, the score was retallied, and, lo and behold, all the loving parents before me were right. To be radiating joy as someone stitches up your obliterated crotch is the real miracle of childbirth.

The next weeks passed in a slow sprint of boring chaos. We changed diapers. I only dropped my phone on the baby twice while reading news coverage of insurrectionists storming the Capitol building. We learned to swaddle. We checked COVID-19-positivity rates. We mastered burping techniques. We watched the Inauguration proceed without incident. We waited for things to get better.

One afternoon, when our new life was starting to seem less impossibly scary, Caldwell and I decided to take the baby on a walk through a large cemetery near our house. “It’s specifically called a ‘memorial park,’ ” I explained to Caldwell, hoping to make the outing seem less morbid. “You’re supposed to treat it like a park.” Even after I said this, I was surprised to discover lots of people, sprawled out, with folding lawn chairs and coolers, picnicking and making a day of it. This cemetery had been established in 1906, but beyond the expected, worn headstones from the twenties and forties and seventies were hillsides where the headstones were more spread out and shiny. July, 2020. August, 2020. October, 2020. Each stone marked someone who had died in this past year. Whether they had died of COVID-19 or not, there was no doubt that their final days had been made harder, lonelier, scarier by the pandemic.

The baby started crying, and we took it as our cue to leave. “Shh, shh, you’re O.K,” I said. “We’re O.K.” As the weeks wore on, I kept a running tally of slow improvements. The baby slept for six hours straight. My parents and in-laws got vaccine appointments, and we started making tentative plans for them to meet the baby over the summer. I got a news alert with the headline “The COVID news is bad, but there’s room for optimism.”

With some of the fog finally cleared, I e-mailed myself a note: “Days 4 and 8 very bad. Everything better after day 12.” I wanted an exact record in case I ever did this again and forgot what it was like. The idea that I could and, in fact, almost definitely would forget these bad days was a comfort of its own. In May, my vaccinated mother finally made it out to Los Angeles to deliver four missed months’ worth of baby squeezes, and Caldwell and I went back to CVS to get our second doses of the COVID vaccine. In a flimsy vestibule erected at the end of the aisle with the bleach and laundry detergent, a “certified immunizer” said, “Congratulation!” as he stuck the needle in my arm, and I said, “Thank you!” when he pulled it out. I then took a seat in the little collection of chairs set up in the paper-goods aisle to wait the recommended fifteen minutes to see if I reacted poorly to the vaccine.

“Do we need any toilet paper?” Caldwell asked. The shelves bursting with plastic-wrapped rolls behind him would have been a dream come true a year ago.

“I think we’re O.K.,” I said. But, when the wait was over and we were free to leave, I grabbed a pack, just to be safe.