Illustration by Ponomariova_Maria / iStock / Getty Images Plus
If there’s one thing experiencing pregnancy in isolation gave artist Caitlin Metz, it was freedom from unsolicited comments about her changing body. “You’re not prepared for the checker at Trader Joe’s to ask you how you’re processing COVID and your pregnancy,” she says. Before St. Louis slowly reopened, Metz (who became pregnant in January) and her partner existed in a bubble, which, in turn, forced her to become hyper-aware of how her feelings shifted with her growing belly. With little social connection and no plans, just leaving bed felt harder for Metz, who is diagnosed with anxiety and depression. She once clung to hope that the pandemic would subside before her due date. Now, the couple must set boundaries and decide who will meet their child, who was born in September. Says Metz: “We’re constantly reacclimating to ‘What does the world look like?’ And ‘What does it mean to bring a new human into the world at this time?’”
Earlier this summer, Saint Louis Night Out’s Niki Bridges began experiencing symptoms she feared could be linked to COVID-19, so she sent a note to her doctor on a telehealth website. She fell into a diabetic coma that night. Fortunately, a family member noticed Bridges’ disappearance and contacted her landlord. At the hospital, she spent a week and a half in the coma. Even after she woke up, additional health problems forced her to stay for the entire month of July. “Follow your gut,” she says. “Never be afraid to seek medical help. Don’t think you’re bothering your doctor or being a hypochondriac.” Now Bridges is altering her entire lifestyle on top of adjusting to finding joy inside (lately, it’s Riverdale) rather than on a St. Louis event calendar. “It was a harsh reset,” she says. “Right now, I have an appreciation of where I am in life and thinking about new goals and things I want to accomplish in the years to come.” But she’s not planning too far ahead—just in case it gets canceled.
State Representative Mary Elizabeth Coleman didn’t realize the early days of caring for a family on a budget prepared her for life during a pandemic. “It sounds so elementary, but how do you feed three kids breakfast, lunch, and dinner and do dishes and work and have no childcare and no money?” she recalls. Now she’s corralling a household of six children as she and her husband work from home—with her speaking on 900-person Zooms and her husband leading meetings for 200 employees. “[This time] has changed expectation management within our family and what it means to be a part of the family,” she says. For other parents, she advises: “You just have to give yourself grace and lower your expectations. You can’t possibly learn how to parent full-time for the first time and how to make a home for the time... It’s just overwhelming. It’s just too much.”
Nurse practitioner Maki Cronin says while her life can be stressful, it hasn’t changed much during the pandemic—she’s still caring for patients, now just in personal protective equipment. “The scary part is when someone comes in for COVID, they may show symptoms and they often don’t look too sick,” she says. But a recent family trauma taught her how to better relay information to her patients and their families. The only medical professional in her family, Cronin has been translating med-speak for her mother and sisters in Japan; her father sustained a stroke last year. She was set to visit and check on him this May. “When I moved away from Japan, I made the decision knowing that if anything happened, I am not going to be able to get back easily,” she says. “No news is good news. So when I hear from them, my stomach drops.”
