I Needed Time, and Covid Gave It

I needed this year. 

I needed this time. 

When she was born, and I had been naive. I planned to take my allotted five weeks of maternity leave, bouncing back to work and grad school.

“Five weeks wasn't enough to figure out how to leave her, feed her, and would she be okay without me?”

It didn't happen like that. 

Not at all. 

My Mom was waiting on a Hail Mary from the doctors in Boston, and I found myself terrified that something was going to happen to my baby. Despite all reassurances and sound logic, my PPD and PPA were louder. Much louder. 

I couldn't lose her. 

I couldn't lose them.

Five weeks wasn't enough to figure out how to leave her, feed her, and would she be okay without me? She wouldn't latch (lip tie, tongue tie, and a bubble pallet). Everything was tangled, wondering if my Mom would die and if the baby was okay? Work gave me a few more weeks. But I couldn't separate ANY OF IT! 

With a lot of tears and deep reluctance, I went back to work. 

I loved my students, but I loved my baby more. 

I loved my Mom more.

I wanted and needed these first days, these last days with both of them. 

What if I just had one more month to try and figure out breastfeeding? What if I had one more afternoon to sit in bed with my Mom, passing my newborn baby and her first grandchild back and forth while the two of them drifted in and out of sleep. I desperately needed more time with my Mom to teach me and show me how to Mother. She had this beautiful way of making everything seem lighter and less scary; she was a Mom.

She was my Mom.

“My Mom was waiting on a

Hail Mary from the doctors in Boston..”

I wanted my daughter too.

There was this distance between us, my daughter and I that I could never seem to recover. I would cry to colleagues. I would hide in stairwells and cry as I pumped breast milk. It would pain me for years. I would go to therapy, one hour a week, but all the therapy in the world couldn’t make up for the time I needed to heal this.

A few years passed, and it was still all tangled. 

Then Covid. 

In the Spring of 2020, we decided that I wouldn't return to teaching in the fall. I would stay home with our girls. 

And while it hasn't been easy, it has been healing. I can feel her close again. The way I did when they first laid her on my chest, and suddenly I knew the world was right now that she was here. I had lost that; I mourned that feeling for year's and this year, being able to be with her, as intimately as those newborn days, has healed me in ways I desperately needed and couldn't have imagined.  

There is no distance now. I feel her close to me always now; I always had; it was buried under so much pain that I had no time to untangle.

It seems there are very few silver linings during this pandemic.

I was given time.
I am deeply grateful.