About two weeks ago, I found out that I am likely to give birth to my daughter via a planned cesarean section, for medical reasons. That news, which may have disappointed other mothers-to-be, left me elated. Why? Because I am one of the few pregnant women with a guaranteed due date.
I am also what the world calls Type A. I am a planner, a worrier — someone who likes to think 10 steps ahead.
Planning soothes me, and I really did think I had planned for everything around my child’s birth. I even have a spreadsheet — divided into nine tidy tabs, to keep track of product recommendations, resources for new parents, questions for my insurance company and what to pack in my hospital bag — so nothing falls through the cracks.
But there was no way to plan for this pandemic. And so it’s proving to be a jarring lesson in chilling out and learning to go with the flow. Maybe, in the end, that will be a good thing.
While I am doing my best to self-quarantine and not leave the house unless it’s absolutely essential, I am almost in my third trimester of pregnancy, which means I am going to the doctor every two weeks and will be staying at a nearby hospital in just a few months. The estimated worst-case scenario is that between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected with the coronavirus during this pandemic — it could become hard to avoid even if I am discerning about when I venture outside.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t have many answers to questions about the dangers the virus poses to pregnant women and their babies. While the C.D.C. has said that so far infants of mothers with the coronavirus haven’t tested positive, and the virus has not appeared in samples of amniotic fluid or breast milk, there are just a small number of known cases to draw conclusions from. And we know of at least one newborn who tested positive (it’s not clear whether the baby contracted the virus in the womb or during labor). There have been pregnancy and delivery problems (such as preterm birth), but the C.D.C. says it is unclear whether those complications were a result of infection.
Amid this absence of information, I’m already thinking about my next trip to the grocery store — a place that now has a post-apocalyptic air about it — to purchase baby wipes and other staples before my daughter’s early-June arrival. I of course, didn’t plan for this, either. One month ago, my cursor was hovering over the “purchase” button on Amazon, ready to order a shipment of baby supplies when my mom told me, rightly, that I might be overpreparing — not only did I have time, but toiletries of that nature were one click away. Now that toilet paper and other basics are hot commodities, however, I have visions of racing other suburban moms down the diaper aisle to snatch products that I took for granted just a week ago.
I have recently spent more time unplanning than planning. The baby shower will be canceled, and I’ll spend the next few weeks fantasizing about the maternity massage that I was supposed to be getting in Maine on the babymoon that has now been removed from my calendar. These tiny pleasures were things that kept me sane at 3:30 a.m. when pregnancy insomnia set in or when my baby kicked particularly hard. With these ritual celebrations off the table, the rest of my pregnancy has taken on an air of an extended medical procedure: Go to the doctor; get an ultrasound to make sure she’s OK; try to make sure I stay healthy; repeat.
It seems the world she is being born into is smaller than it was before coronavirus swaddled the globe. Instead of having an endless stream of visitors stopping by to greet her, it’s possible that she will know only me, my husband and our immediate family in her first months. Taking her to the beach to touch sand and water for the first time and lounge with other babies now seems out of the question. She’ll become familiar with the mile radius around our house as we take her on walks, but she might not be able to experience the nearby parks, which are now closed. I asked my family to make sure their flu and whooping cough vaccines were up-to-date four months before her birth, but now might have to ask them to self-quarantine for 14 days before meeting her. That’s the extent of the control I have.
All this time I thought that the worst I would have to protect her from in the early days would be the common cold, and I would combat that by wiping off her tiny, ever-sticky hands, feeling like the most capable doctor in the nation’s best hospital. Now I realize that not only can I not prepare for her birth in a pandemic, but it’s also likely that a lot of her life will be beyond my protection. My spreadsheets will be useless. I’m forced to accept that I can’t plan for everything; I don’t have any choice but to be agile — no one knows what the world will look like in three months.
But then again, we live in unprecedented times. Amid climate change and the Trump presidency, we don’t know what the world is going to look like in 10 or 15 years, either. We have children not because we know we can usher them through the world safely but despite all the uncertainty; we do what we can and then hope for the best, hope that we’re bringing people into the world who will not only learn to navigate its dangers on their own but also help fix it for future generations.
Are you a new parent or about to become one? Tell us about how the spread of the coronavirus has changed your expectations and plans for parenthood. Share your story in the comments below.
Alexandra March is a staff editor in Opinion.
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