Lockdown eases and my maternity leave can begin…six months in

After much anticipation, England’s Covid restrictions have eased and mixing is making a come back. So as we step with trepidation back into (small) social circles, this is my story about being pregnant in a pandemic and going into labour in lockdown. Spoiler alert…it’s not ideal.

I am sharing my story for three reasons:

1. It’s been hard, sometimes I feel rubbish and writing it down might help me and others
2. Lots of lovely organisations are asking for stories to push for improved services
3. Stories like mine might help people to empathise with pregnant women and new parents

(Perhaps this long read feels self indulgent…but actually, that’s just what I need right now!)

My pregnancy and the pandemic

Sunday 1 March 2020, just days after learning we were expecting our first baby, Matt Hancock was on Marr, answering questions about cancelling large events and if we’d stop people mixing in public. Hancock seemed relaxed and gave off a ‘it won’t come to that, we’ve got this’ kind of vibe. We all know how that turned out.

My pregnancy was such great news and we knew how thrilled our family were going to be. We needed a lift as my nan died just a few weeks earlier, I was very close to her and spoke at her funeral. I didn’t know it at the time, but as we were saying goodbye to our matriarch, I was carrying the latest addition to the family, and was about to embark on a pregnancy and postnatal experience unlike any we’d seen anybody go through.

Early March, the stress began…my husband landed himself in hospital with suspected appendicitis, suspicion that carried a two night stay. Covid chatter was ramping up and I was wary of being on the ward. Whilst he was in hospital, I had a small bleed and I needed to have a scan. All was fine, but that was the first taste of the anxiety that’s plagued this period. That was the only scan that he attended with me.

As March unfolded, so did the severity and reality of Covid-19, and before too long pregnant women were classed as being vulnerable to the virus. Just on that, pregnancy isn’t an underlying health condition that impacts you…it’s a feeling of responsibility that is unrivaled. You are responsible for somebody else’s future and the thought of you getting seriously ill whilst you’re carrying your unborn child is chilling.

As a society, we need to place more value and consideration on people who are carrying and caring for the next generation.

As lockdown one hit, it coincided with some significant stress that I was dealing with elsewhere, and I experienced a tight chest and shortness of breath. The GP suspected a blood-clot and I was given an urgent hospital appointment for an MRI scan. I was under three months pregnant and petrified. I remember begging the medic for an alternative way to investigate or for a delay so I could see how I was in a few days.

Her words; “if this is a clot, a few days may be a few days too late, and with this pandemic hitting us hard, it’s going to be a war zone here.”

They packed lead around my tummy to protect my baby and as the machine rolled over me, tears streamed down my face.

The good news, it wasn’t a blood-clot.

Spring brought sunshine, and like many people, I cracked on with working intensively from home, leading a team and trying to make the best of a tough situation. I moved house into a new area at the end of 2019 to be closer to my workplace (yes a crystal ball would have been handy!) so we hadn’t had long to meet people before Covid hit. As my pregnancy developed, restrictions dictated that I attend each and every appointment alone, I began to feel increasingly isolated and I had a constant feeling of being displaced. There weren’t any antenatal classes running at all and my NCT group was cancelled. I should have been sharing this special time with my mates and my family, the way they shared their pregnancy journeys with me, but I couldn’t. Many members of our family didn’t see my bump and not being with my colleagues sucked, I never got a chance to be ‘the pregnant person in the room’.

As my bump grew, so did the Covid death-toll and it started dawning on me that this thing would not be over by my due date…that scared me. The second half of my pregnancy saw a couple of hospital visits due to ‘reduced fetal movement’. I was feeling the strain at the time and had insomnia, I remember frantically working on my laptop in the waiting room, alone and masked up, before being called in to have a strap around my bump and asked to press a buzzer every time my baby kicked. Strange and stressful.

After recruiting my maternity cover and working hard on a handover, I signed off from work in October, a couple of weeks before my due date. I was stressed and exhausted, but I pushed that to the back of my mind to focus on our imminent new arrival…turns out, the arrival wasn’t as imminent as we thought. As my due date came and went*, I was put under pressure to have an induction. I had heard lots of negative induction stories and the birth education that I did empowered women to take control of their birth plans and not be pushed into being induced. I had to make some big decisions, statistics about the risks of stillbirth were being thrown at me, I had the fear of giving birth alone going through my head, and I had to meet with consultants and have an additional scan and further appointments, again alone.

*turns out, stress stops oxytocin from flowing…and you need plenty of that to kick-start labour.

A lot of this stuff might be normal and par for the course in pregnancy, but I’ve never been pregnant before and I now belong to this club of mums who’ve been through it in these unimaginable circumstances, where every feeling felt heightened.

This is not been maternity leave, this is maternity leave in a global pandemic

As we went into our second national lockdown, our baby girl was born healthy, with a full head of hair and her eyes wide open. My husband was by my side for the whole thing (which was not a given). The team on the Maternity Unit at York Hospital were superb. I cannot thank them enough for their amazing care. After her birth we were able to stay in our suite for some time as a family, to relax, recover and get to know our daughter. After this time, I was moved onto the maternity ward with my baby and told that the bay curtains must be closed and that I shouldn’t communicate with any other mums. Eight mums, separated by fabric, each with something in common, yet unable to connect.

For obvious reasons relating to caring for a newborn, this blog has taken me months to write. But in addition to those reasons, there is a storm of thoughts, feelings and hormones that are surging through my mind and body. I have so much to say, yet stringing things into sentences has been challenging.

My maternity leave so far has not been the experience that I expected. I acknowledge my privilege and recognise that some women have more challenging circumstances than mine to deal with, but I still think it’s important to share how I’m feeling and to say that it’s okay.

Since the birth of our baby, we have been like many people, pretty much on our own. I was signed off from midwife and health visitor care very quickly, and that was it, over to us. Being a first time mum, during a dark winter lockdown, felt like some strange purgatory. There I was with a beautiful, healthy baby that I delivered into the world, and I wanted to scream from the rooftops ‘look at her, look what we did!’, but I couldn’t. Instead it has felt like we are raising her behind closed doors. It feels like putting your tap shoes on and dancing on the carpet.

So although I have experienced some of the most magical and happy moments over the last few months, there are times when it all just feels surreal and somehow unreal.

There is a lot to unpack in how that’s played out in practice and how I’ve felt.

Staying healthy

Me getting ill isn’t really an option, I have exclusively breastfed my baby since her birth and she hasn’t taken to having expressed milk from a bottle. So when it comes to feeding, it’s all on me. Because of that, the virus still feels like a danger to us and something else layered on top of the mirard of things I have to think about. As I’m sure most first time breastfeeding mums will confirm, there is enough to get your head around already, without a pesky pandemic. Apart from the skeleton support on the ward and in the community, I have done this alone. I haven’t had new mum mates to chat to during the night shift, I haven’t been in coffee shops comparing latches, positions and nipple creams. Between me and baba, we’ve just found our way.

At times, the exhaustion has been overwhelming, and I know that every new parent has that, it comes with the gig. In my case, I’ve had a lack of release or rest bite. No shops to stroll around, no coffee mornings or baby groups, no option to nip out for a bite to eat. Nobody has been helping us with cooking or cleaning. We’re miles away from family and friends, without options for leisure or relaxation. Even the home based stuff that people have been doing to unwind or feel productive during lockdown haven’t been open to us. DIY with a newborn…not going to happen. Cocktail night, nope.

Maternity ‘leave’ needs reframing, it isn’t a break, or a holiday. It’s a role. You are putting your energy, ideas and skills into raising a person to contribute to our society in the future. The respite helps you to do a good job and the connections you make through activities are like your colleagues with whom you can problem-solve and confer.

Desperately seeking socials

Being on maternity leave in lockdown has meant creating a new normal for the three of us. My husband is working from home, so although that’s meant he has been on hand to help at either side of his zoom packed days, he hasn’t had any headspace away from what’s happening at home. Sleep deprived, he commutes the flight of stairs and is constantly in ear-shot of his new home-life. Less work life balance and more work life blur.

Often, our weeks have been made up of groundhog days. Little to no variety at all. My baby has clothes that she’ll never wear, we haven’t had the places to go. I’ve been anxious that her development and social skills will be negatively impacted by the lack of interactions. The same activities day in day out and the intensity of focusing so exclusively on my baby without anything to break it up has brought on pounding headaches and an almost claustrophobic feeling.

Our lockdown lifestyle has led to baba associating her coat and pram with sleep, as we head out on our ‘daily walk’ she nods off…and now refuses to nap in the house!

Relocating for work was a big decision, I didn’t make it lightly. But I meet and get on with people easily so I thought that I’d soon settle in. Plus, knowing that we’d like to start a family in some ways made it easier, as I thought I’d throw myself into lots of groups to grow a network. This idea being scuppered is a massive deal, and it’s what is making my maternity leave especially difficult. Lots of new mums talk about how strange it feels to walk away from their day job to look after their baby and how this can impact their sense of self. I am very heavily invested in my work and career so I was prepared for the transition to be hard, but the pandemic has given a whole new meaning to the role of ‘stay at home mum’. When I started maternity and left my work and colleagues behind, I thought that there would be plenty of things to fill that void. Turns out, not so much. I moved for work, then work vanished. I am an extrovert, I get my energy from being around people, but I’ve been locked down with a newborn, in a strange place, pretty isolated with extremely limited opportunities for social interactions. Until this week, my baby had never met another baby, (when she did…I cried!) My baby has only seen her grandparents a couple of times, and I have best friends (her aunties!) who she is yet to meet. Those that she has met have been outdoors, she’s been wrapped up in her coat and hat and been fed and changed in car parks. It’s been uncomfortable and inconvenient. Sure, there have been plenty of video calls, but in some ways that has also taken some of the ‘special moments’ away from us, as when people do meet her, the element of surprise has gone.

I am very proud of my daughter already, and I have barely had the pleasure of seeing other people be pleased to see her, or any reassurance that we are doing a good job. Now, there could be a whole other blog on why I (and many other mums) are somehow conditioned to show our babies to the world and seek the approval and reassurance of others. Perhaps lockdown might make me and others like me see that actually that doesn’t matter at all. Time will tell.

Social media has been both a lifeline and a brain drain. It’s been helpful to follow mum accounts and stay connected, but at the height of the pandemic, doom scrolling in the early hours did me no good at all. I followed the news too closely, I thought about work way too much and I compared my life to others. Big mistake.

The loss of identity or self that seems common feels compounded by becoming a parent under these circumstances. It’s been a year since I dressed like me. Some days it’s been hard to drag a comb through my hair, as everything and everyone comes before my own self-care now, plus…who is going to see me? Everything that I thought was ‘me’ has been thrown in the air and I am waiting for it to land again.

Although this all sounds pretty grim, luckily, I haven’t felt too depressed during all this (the fear of PND kicking in was real), for the most part I have managed to stay positive and motivated, looking ahead to better and brighter days and taking happiness in seeing my baby develop. But, I think I’ve been close and I think many mums will be on the edge, if not over it. Please check in on your pals, they are getting on with it because they don’t have a choice…but trust me it has been a slog and an open beer garden isn’t a solution.

What has helped…a fantastic bestie of mine bubbled with us, she has been ace and brought a friendly face, and a helping hand. Family and friends have sent little packages through the post, opening them has been such a treat. Comparing notes with my experienced parent pals (often daily!) and calls and messages from people checking in has really made a difference, knowing that people are thinking of us and ‘get’ that this is a tough gig.

Right now, I am grieving for the experience that I haven’t had, I am longing for the mum mates that I haven’t made and I am chomping at the bit to get out and have some ‘proper’ maternity leave. Yet, switching to a period of freedom somehow feels daunting, I need to reset and reboot (if in doubt, turn it off and on again right?!).

My maternity role starts right here.