I walked out of the hospital on March 17, 2020, having just given birth to my beautiful daughter the day before.
My husband and I rounded the corner and encountered a woman smoking a cigarette. “Ooh, cute, can I have a look?” she said, peering at my baby. “No, thanks,” we replied and kept on walking.
I declined her request because she was a stranger and had a cigarette in her hand, not because I was afraid of COVID-19. The truth is, it wasn’t really on my radar then.
But I’m one of the lucky moms. My daughter was born just on the right side of the chaos, when the realities of the virus hadn’t yet upended our lives.
She was born on a Monday, and by that Friday, the Prime Minister announced that schools would close in advance of the first national lockdown here in the United Kingdom.
Holding my 4-day-old baby in my arms, I learned that I would be homeschooling my 5-year-old son for some undefined amount of time.
How do you teach a 5-year-old how to form letters and write sentences when you have a newborn in your arms? How do you muster enough mental energy to convince your wonderful but very bouncy son to sit down and do the work when you’ve only had a cumulative 8 hours of sleep in the past 4 days?
While I was giving birth, I didn’t imagine I would be asking myself these questions a mere 4 days later. I was concerned with how I would bond with my daughter and physically recover from the beautiful but taxing job of bringing life into this world.
Bonding? Sitting around and snuggling your newborn? Sleep when the baby sleeps? (That one always irked me anyway.) Laughable! I found myself in one of the most impossible situations during what is one of the most vulnerable times in a woman’s life.
There is a hub run by the New York Times called “Primal Scream.” They have a hotline set up for mothers homeschooling their children where they can just vent. Listen to the desperation in their voices. Their voices are mine.
In the early days, while my body was knitting itself back together after giving birth, and while my only pressing concern should have been whether my daughter was feeding well and thriving, I also needed to be teacher, peer, lunch lady, playmate… everything for my son, who couldn’t even go to the playground.
It was relentless.
There are things I can teach him with bleary eyes, such as handwriting and mathematics, but I cannot be a kid his age and help him learn the social skills that are so important at 5 years.
What is more, he would not sit still. (Do any 5-year-olds?) The constant jumping, running, and bouncing set my nerves on edge, and my protective motherly instincts went into overdrive to keep my daughter safe.
During the first year of my son’s life, I can remember experiencing anxiety.
I later learned that this is common due to the brain going wild with the instinct to keep your baby safe. This happened again after my daughter’s birth, but with the pandemic bearing down on me, the worry about my children’s safety sat on my chest like a hippopotamus.
I would tell my husband that I was experiencing anxiety and intrusive images, but I realized I wasn’t adequately explaining it to him. One day I did, and his jaw dropped. Allow me to illustrate what I mean.
What I communicated to my husband: “I’m anxious about our son’s safety while I’m walking with him and our daughter alone.”
The event that happened in real life: While I was walking around our neighborhood with my kids, my son skipped ahead of me. To ensure he stayed safe, I called out to him to stop while I caught up with my daughter in the stroller, which we did.
What happened in my head: As my son ran ahead, and I worried for his safety, a truck came from out of nowhere and crashed into him at 60 miles an hour.
My brain played this image in front of my eyes as if it were actually happening. And it would sit with me for hours or days afterward. My body didn’t know the difference between daymare and reality — the cortisol, the worry, the trauma was real for me.
These uninvited slideshows of horror would play in my mind daily. It was insidious because they would materialize from out of nowhere anytime I thought about potential dangers.
Source: Medical News Today
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