This shit is hard.

I said the same thing when my daughter was first born and I’m reliving it again – postpartum…7 years later.

Quarantine with a child – an only child, a very intuitive and emotional child, a child who was already coping with trauma, a child who doesn’t fully understand the situation and hears ‘death’ and ‘loss’ and ‘illness’ and is triggered once again with anxiety, a child who is extremely outgoing and feeds off social situations, a child who is now exhibiting all of the emotional coping behaviors that go with this added stress and confusion we’re all feeling with life right now – it’s postpartum 2.0. And it’s hard.

Just as with every birth story, this experience with parenting right now is 100% personal, and what and how it affects us is an intimate web of emotion to deal with. Our life and background and beliefs and conditioning all affect how well – or not – we’re coping with this and it’s definitely not all black and white. It’s a rollercoaster ride that won’t stop – sometimes you’re into the thrill, sometimes you just want to get off. My heart and empathy goes out to every mother right now in solidarity – regardless of how many kids she has, their ages, personalities, level of support, place on the spectrum, health/social/economic/marital status, etc. – we’re all dealing with this as a collective and it’s time right now to support each other through this just as we did in the beginning with that new baby we had no idea how to care for, when we were running on nothing but instinct and love. Our experiences and challenges may not be the same but they’re ours to live, to process, to overcome and grow from. No one said it was easy. No one has ever parented through something like this before either. There’s definitely no manual now. There are also good days and bad days – hell it’s hour to hour sometimes – and it’s all a test of strength and balance.

I keep mentally replaying the best piece of new mama advice I’d received: It’s ok to mourn your birth story (which obviously didn’t go as planned – far from it – and it was traumatic.) Pregnancy and motherhood was probably the start of me relinquishing control of really anything in my life. When my daughter was born I had to learn how to take care of not only her, but myself, in my recovery and that’s where a lot of my personal inner growth began. And just like it did right before she entered the world, life once again turned upside down this past year. Once again the two of us are learning to navigate life together through the rapids with so much less yet so much more than we did it before. Divorce hasn’t come smoothly for either one of us. We’ve both been running on survival mode ever since and loss in every way has surrounded it. And now with life surrounding the pandemic there is no semblance of “normalcy” as it switched courses again with this quarantine and having to now incorporate homeschool and being a self-employed non-essential and everything that is shifted around that. Our happy little outlets of going to the skating rink and playdates and frozen yogurt and swimming were suddenly swept away. Life swiftly changed once more. And although most everything is shutdown, life doesn’t stop. Birthdays, deaths, graduations, friendships, births – they’re all still happening and not how we had planned. It’s a lot of sudden change – and it’s ok to mourn those moments.

Right now there is no doula. There isn’t the physical support who can drop in and help, to hold the baby for you when you need a minute – when you’re touched out, emotionally and physically burnt out, tired, feel unpretty, haven’t changed out of your pajamas all day or barely eaten, roots grown out, bored, need to feel like an adult with just a little time and space to yourself, stressed out, uninspired, (did I mention tired?), and on top of it all physically restrained to any escape in the outside world. This mindset takes a toll on you normally but under this current situation its amplified to the extreme.

And these babies – no matter the age – they just want to be held right now. They don’t understand, they just feel. They’re on survival mode and depend on you to comfort anything that feels uncomfortable, that feels different. Life isn’t the same for any of us. You’re their safety net and have been since day one but now no one really knows where to fall anymore. We’re relearning ourselves, our roles, where our reliance lies. We’re forced once again to place faith and trust in ourselves first. Mother knows best right? No pressure there. And just in the beginning when so much is thrown at you that it’s absolutely overwhelming – when it’s that fourth trimester, that period of cluster feeding and you’re trying to run all of the life that is coming at you – you just have to stop, strip it all down, and post up in bed with a steady stream of Netflix, water, and snacks and accept that that is life right now –nourishing that togetherness – and really that is the essence of it all. So as I’ve stripped down a lot of the worry about finishing homeschooling assignments, picking up lost “non-essential” work, finding one iota of creativity, dinner, bills, exercise, checking in on friends and family, meal prepping, everything else, I remind myself to get back to that place and that mindset and know that besides the basic needs in the day what truly matters right now is sitting in bed with a movie, eating popcorn, and sharing those laughs and connections with my child…laundry folded or not. It will serve her more than anything else right now.

So as we all learn to navigate these new waters remember to check in with yourself then check on your mom friends. We’ve all been here before and we need to remember when we leaned on each other back then – when we taught each other those coping skills, when we learned together. Until playdates and playgrounds are deemed safe, until there are coffee and brunch dates once more we have to remain open in our village and remember those new mamas too who are experiencing this double. That simultaneous lonely and lovely time. This is how we get through, get back – togetherness – and once more it starts at home. Back to cradling these babes, stroking their heads, sharing nothing but love and getting to know each other – again.

Photo credit [Maria Foor]