The COVID-19 pandemic forced this mother to become an essential worker in the hospital and at home

This picture sums up my experience as a new mom. A mom who can’t get her baby to sleep. A mom who can’t get her baby to gain weight or breastfeed without pain. A mom who cries as the sun sets out of fear of the nighttime. A mom who can’t soothe her baby. 

I planned my pregnancy diligently. I wanted everything to be beautiful and perfect. At the beginning of 2020, my husband, who’s more diligent about keeping up with the news, started asking “What about this COVID?” Honestly, even as a nurse, I don’t get super excited about a lot of stuff. It takes a lot to get me worked up, so I didn’t think that much about it. In the days leading up to [the hospital] getting our first COVID-19 patient, no one in the area knew how hard we were going to be hit by this. [Our hospital administration] said, “In case you do get a COVID patient, this is what we’ll do…” And then all of a sudden, we got several COVID patients so it really ramped up despite all the preparation we had.

Then my husband and I spent my maternity leave in a bubble. We had our groceries delivered; we would go out for essentials. The uninterrupted time we spent together during those months is priceless. However, the toll of stay-at-home orders meant additional pressure as a new mom to do it all. My parents and my husband’s parents would stand six feet away outside and awe over the baby from a distance. They didn’t get to hold him until he was three months.

As a new mom, I was ignorant about a lot of things. I’ve had a really hard time with basic things, like getting my baby to breastfeed well. And because he didn’t breastfeed well, he had issues with weight gain. That threw me into this mental spiral of “I’m not doing a good job.” I had the standard baby blues that postpartum women get. The worst for me was always at night, because there was no reprieve for me throughout the day at all. I was exclusively breastfeeding and my baby didn’t really sleep. The sun would go down, and I would just get super panicky about the fact that I had been up all day and was also going to be up all night latching a baby on really painful breasts, trying to get him to soothe. I did not seek out any counseling or care from my OB/GYN, because I was under the impression that what I was dealing with was just kind of happens and it was just the way people felt. But I knew I just didn’t feel like myself. 

I had a lot of anxiety about going back to work. I had several discussions with my husband, like, Can we make this happen where I don’t have to work? But it was never an option for me—I have to feed my family and pay my mortgage. In a busy ICU, you have to rely on other people to take time out of their day to watch my patients on top of their own patients so that I can go pump for a long enough period of time to make enough milk. I pump as I drive to work in silence. I arrive, carrying in my work bag, lunch bag, pumping bag, the respirator I bought for myself, and purse. I wear hospital scrubs, shoe covers, a respirator designed for workers in industrial jobs, a plastic gown, wrap my hair up in a surgical cap, and cover it with a face shield. I spend thirteen hours barely bobbing my head above water as I struggle to stay ahead of the tasks and make time to pump milk. The stress of watching so much death and playing phone tag to update helpless family members has taken a toll on my supply and my well-being. I leave the building with far more baggage than I carried in, pumping again in my car on the way home. At work, I am desperate to be home. At home, I am grappling with anxiety about work. 

Then, I started breaking mother rules I had always vowed I wouldn’t. As time went on, breastfeeding slowly became easier. We started co-sleeping and side-lying feeding. I rocked and fed my baby to sleep. I fed on demand and stopped worrying about a schedule. I have become a “hero” and “essential frontline worker” against my will in the other main arena of my life: my career. There’s not a single facet of my life right now that I’m not needed, and that is a heavy feeling. I am determined to find the balance. 

—as told to Samantha Stevenson