Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash
January
We’ve been liberated, finally, from the all-day, all-consuming, all-confusing death-stare of hyperemesis, a strangely ardent symptom of bearing life. We are free of the couch, the endless Gatorades, the slow-walking to avoid upchucking, the hesitancy in drinking a glass of water, the inability to dance to “Zou Bisou Bisou” with Mona on my hip, being twirled, dipped, her toddler curls tickling my face. I am free—of the endless sticks of gum to settle my stomach, the chasm between me and other mothers whose sickness wasn’t much, the chasm between me and the world, which haunts me still; but most importantly, we are free of the chasm between us, Mona and me, a chasm I swiftly kick away, holding her close now, as we play in the snow beyond the university where I will be teaching spring semester.
Fuck 2019, I think.
2020 is where it’s at.
February
I was spotting a week ago, but now it’s blood, bright red and mean. The on-call doctor, whose voice soothed me during my most intense bout of hyperemesis one morning, soothes me this morning, as the sunlight streams through the smudged playroom windows, as Leo listens hesitantly to my phone conversation while he is playing with Mona at a miniature table, but this time the doctor says, “You better come in. I’ll tell Labor and Delivery to expect you.”
I am twenty weeks pregnant.
In Labor and Delivery, I realize I’ve been admitted in case I give birth, a thought so gruesome I hadn’t yet pondered it. Leo and Mona, who have brought me here, spend time in the children’s play area of the maternity wing, then they eventually prepare to leave to go to Trader Joe’s. Mona’s been antsy, asking if the baby is okay. I force a smile—“We are here to make sure,” I say.
In Labor and Delivery, the resident is a tiny cartoon of a woman, weighed down by beepers, and she wants to give me steroids as a precaution but needs to check first. In Labor and Delivery, the hoarse-voiced nurse is generous (Some women even have periods while pregnant and don’t know why, she muses, throwing hard facts under the bus for the sake of kindness). In Labor and Delivery, my on-call doctor, the boss of the resident, comes in, calm, and says they can’t find anything wrong, and if it keeps happening, they’ll keep looking. “But don’t,” he says, “view this as black mark on your pregnancy. Just a question mark.”
Just a question mark.
Later this month: There’s talk of Covid-19. My mother-in-law, who has shouldered a hefty portion of our childcare while I teach, is leaving our home after playing with Mona one day when she mentions my father-in-law wonders if I’m nervous. I think she is being kind when she wants to shrug it off—“I told him there’s no need to be. It’s not Zika,” she says.
“Exactly,” I scoff.
I decidedly mimic what my friend said a week ago at our kids’ swim lessons. We were huddled inches apart in humid, plastic chairs under giant, florescent lights that reflected shards of painful gleams on the already neon-blue watery ripples of the pool, our sinuses infected with chlorine, watching our husbands in the water with our daughters for the last time, when my friend said, “The world cannot just shut down.”
I’m not worried, I emphasize to my mother-in-law, because not-worried is how I want to feel. That’s not how I feel.
March
As the raindrops swell and slide down the windshield of the Subaru, which hums next to Portland, Maine’s Baxter Woods, engine idling, my ankles filling with blood, my belly bulging, and my daughters sleeping, one in my belly and one behind me, long legs dangling from her car seat; as I read the news about a man in New York City contracting Covid-19, I tell myself to be calm, to think of the baby, the bleeding, which seems to be worse when I’m scared. I’m so scared.
Stop being scared, my brain hammers itself. Stop.
Within weeks, Governor Janet Mills issues a stay-at-home order.
April
I know no other way to be a mother than to be Mona’s mother. Mona was born three years ago today. No one is here for her birthday. My sweet cousin has compiled a video splicing together messages from various family members telling Mona happy birthday. People from all over the country. Her uncle and his partner make a music video—they are musician and animator respectively, and the song and animations include all the animals of my child’s life. Leo and I cry while watching it. We let Mona watch it about twenty times. We lift the screen time rules today. She knows she is loved.
I apologize to her later this month—for being unable to go to the places we used to go, like Big Sky Bakery, where she used to sit at a small table and squeeze her hands into bread dough set out for kids. Or the art store next door where, if I was feeling rich, we would buy plastic wind-up toys for a dollar. Or her grandparents’ house, where she’d visit twice weekly.
I wonder how to be age-appropriate about the pandemic, which Leo and I have deemed, hopefully, germ season, assuming it will only last the length of a season—like fall, winter, spring, summer. We parents don’t know how to explain it to ourselves, let alone our child.
Mona looks thoughtful when I say, “I’m sorry we can’t go so many places, but we will again, after germ season is over.”
She hesitates a minute. She says, “But I like being home.”
I’m immediately relieved and surprised. A second later, I’m unnerved and confused. Does that mean she needs challenged to get out more? How will that be possible?
Parenting is a mind-fuck at the best of times, but during a pandemic I’m finding myself in a cluster of indecision and self-doubt while being forced to make countless choices and given emotionally-charged advice by grieving family members who miss us, as we miss them.
It’s the beginning of not knowing what to do, for a very long season.
May
May is a painful month of asking various family members if they might be able to quarantine, in order to watch Mona when I give birth. My mother lives in a large household so she’s out; my aunt and cousin are nearly able, but they live three hours away, and my first birth took only double that time. What if they are too late?
Leo’s parents agree, but though they never come out and say it, I have a sense they think we are uptight assholes about what it means to quarantine—we want them to have all groceries delivered, and not to enter any public places for two weeks, per our pediatrician’s recommendations. “You do know we live in a condo, right?” my father-in-law texts. Maybe we are uptight assholes, I muse. Nevertheless, if so, I’m also an oversensitive one; when they tease us, I tell them we don’t need them. A week later, I ask Leo to tell them we need them. We do. I don’t want to give birth alone.
This month, I explain to Mona that Pappy and Gigi will watch her while Dad and I go to the hospital; it’s coming up. Her sister will be born soon. It will be the first time I have ever spent a night away from Mona. She and I sit on the couch. She stares at the gas fireplace, dusty with lack of use.
She begins to cry. “But I can play in that room. I can come with you,” she says.
“What room?” I ask.
“That part for the kids to play in,” she says, remembering the time I bled, when she and Leo left for Trader Joe’s after Mona grew antsy.
Ramona’s memory is so excellent it’s crushing. I have to get it right, every aspect of parenting, I think, because she will remember it. Does she remember before I was sick? I wonder. Does she remember when I used to be a stay-at-home mother, the first year of her life? How can she? I miss her, though she sits here beside me. I miss the old ways.
“I wish you could come,” I mutter, disassembling into a child beside my own kid.
June
Frances is placed on my chest, angry and red, and I see she is different. She is not a replica of my first child, which is the only way I could imagine her, when she was in me. I guide her to nurse, but she doesn’t seem particularly hungry; she eats casually, not ravenously like her sister. Frankie’s body is pink, and Mona’s was purple, darkened by ink blots of meconium. Thick vernix creases Frank’s skin, just the same, as though she’s been sculpted from clay, and there’s my blood on Frank’s scalp. She is larger than Ramona by almost two pounds, but like Ramona she was born into a quiet room, our merged fortunes alive in everything absent—no caesarian curtain, no knives. There was an epidural this time, but it was elective, and it didn’t work. There was so much pain—but it was the expected pain of birth, of a woman becoming a mother, for the first or next time, of my body being torn by my daughter’s body coming through me. I could have broken in half, I thought, but I didn’t. The pain went, and as soon as it went, there was Frank. Her curly, wet hair was plastered, black, to her face.
At home, Mona is overwhelmed with love and confusion. She spends her days twirling and screaming in Frankie’s face, or quietly reading and memorizing the words to the Babar books, or the Beatrix Potter books lent to us from our neighbor; in particular, Ramona likes the stories about the badger character Tommy Brock.
These storybook characters join us in quarantine, speaking through Mona, who often pretends she herself is Babar or the elephant general Cornelius or Tommy Brock, who is actually a little bit naughty, you see. He likes to pour water on Mr. Tod, the fox; incidentally, this is something Mona likes to do to our dog George, who looks like a fox.
July and August
It’s incredible. Leo’s employer has given him eight weeks of paid paternity leave when Frances is born, a glorious amount of time for a father in the United States, and a gift unlike any other during a global pandemic when all we want to do is not think of the world, just our baby, just our new family. Our family of four. So, for two months, we do just that.
We are cradled in privilege.
We don’t, of course, have any rest by way of sleep these two months, and the nights reduce us to shells each morning that are somehow filled and revived by the sunlight of summer. We go for two-hour walks with our double stroller mid-mornings, each morning; Mona sits on top and Frances, sleeping, is down below. Mona faces out. The flowers are blooming everywhere; we are in a neighborhood close to the center of our city but not too close; we walk a little further out, to the wealthier neighborhood bordering ours, among the doctors’ homes; the sidewalks are scattered with enough people to feel full of life, but no one is within twenty feet of another. We watch it all. We make a list, Leo and I, of everything we see, everything we judge, everything we like to presume we understand. It’s nice to feel up high for once. We dream of making cartoons with captions, cartoons of course we will never have time to make, but nevertheless we muse at all this: 1). Erudite man reading book with blank pages so as not to get distracted from people watching; 2). Woke millennial blowing sneeze into beer bottle during barbecue; 3). Squirrels in trees living best lives; 4). Purple flower opting to bloom; 5). Upper middle-class, white neighborhood amassing signage on lawns to announce Black Lives Matter; 6). Kids drawing rainbows without knowing why; 7). 200-year-old door deciding to break.
What sort of caption would someone write of us, I now wonder: Small family in big world, breathing fresh air?
When we get home, we eat lunch in our yard to the sounds of our neighbors’ small children playing next door, and I nurse the baby while Leo gets out the kiddie pool and knock-off-brand slip-in-slide for Mona to prance and shiver excitedly in. The dogs chase each other around us, or they lie in the sun, tongues hanging loosely in the grass. There is a drought this summer, but our rain barrels have captured all the water we need, and the dry earth keeps our bare feet warm.
One day, Mona sits beside me at the picnic table. Tommy Brock is here today, embodied by Mona, as these things go. Her knees are on the wooden bench. Her hands are on the splintered table. There are flowers, some in the form of weeds albeit, and green grass everywhere, and the sky’s glorious blue contains Mona’s stare as she says as if to no one—I only assume it is to me because I’m the one sitting near her—“Tommy Brock feels so different now. He feels just so different now.”
“What do you mean?” I say.
“Now that he has a new baby at his house,” she says flatly. “And everything is changed.”
September
I understand we must open our Covid bubble beyond us four if we want to open Mona’s world. She hasn’t played with another child since March. We decide, with pain and ambivalence— and with my panic attacks that are repeated late in the night, during which my arms flail to the ceiling fan and I wish I could reach it and spin away—we decide to send Mona back to preschool, her beloved, sweet preschool. And I wonder which one of us is likely to die; could we die? Will it be Frankie, the littlest of us? But I don’t like seeing my daughter, my three-year-old, live in a box. I’m seeing what it’s like, mothering two; I’m balancing physical health (Frankie’s) alongside emotional health (Mona’s). Of course, there’s no room leftover to consider the health of the adults, Leo’s and mine, which is so hinged to our children’s now anyway.
Off Mona goes. Frank is two months old, fresh with her DTaP shot when Mona starts school. Mona wears a mask around her neck, homemade—made by the same friend who gave me the knock-off brand slip-in-slide last summer. She has a rainbow, flower-printed LL Bean backpack from Gigi that devours her. She’s thrilled.
When she comes home happy, my heart is in my throat. Part of me wanted her to hate it, but now: We have to keep doing this, I think. There’s no right thing to do here, as a parent, to send a kid to school or not, these days. But this is, I see, the right thing to do for Mona—send her out into a dangerous world, as though it is safe.
I console myself with the fact that the school is all outside, even if, if possible, we get all the way to Maine’s winter, its sparkling gleam.
October
We slowly expand into our school family. A couple of parents arrange a Halloween gathering in a nearby park, of only school members. Everyone must mask up and social distance. We do. There is a parade. We let the kids play as they would at school. It feels a little bit normal. It feels like a win—like we’ve safely claimed Halloween, like the pandemic hasn’t stolen just this one happy thing.
This is a decent month. Leo and I take Mona back to her favorite beaches, now that the tourists are gone. It’s not too cold. There’s this one place that is perfect, one beach we’ve always loved—Higgins Beach in Scarborough. When you drive straight toward it, it’s as though you know if God exists its surely in the form of Mother Nature; here in her glory, her dark blue glitter, she presents us perspective: a horizon that cuts up to a much lighter sky, a straight line halving heaven and earth except for the surfers.
And, it turns out, it’s a perfect place to social distance; with its gigantic shoreline, the beach allows us to be barely within one hundred feet from anyone. Mona runs freely. She jumps in a tide-pool and swims.
Ramona swims through October.
November
The pandemic surges. My brother-in-law and his partner, the ones who made the loving music video for Mona’s birthday, decide to cross the country to come for Thanksgiving to stay with Leo’s parents, about two miles from our home. So far, we have only seen Leo’s parents outside during the pandemic, aside from the birth. I am afraid to see any of them now. I don’t think it’s safe until two weeks after the two households merge, even though Leo’s brother and his partner are getting tested four days after they arrive in the state. But this month, this whole month, of discussing when and how we will see them, is encompassed, in my mind, by misunderstanding. They think, it seems, that we don’t love them, because we are playing it extra safe.
“Is there something I’m missing here?” my brother-in-law texts Leo.
“Is there something I’m missing here?” I ask Leo when he tells me about the text.
There’s that nagging feeling that love is so often selfish, that our family’s desire to see our children has outrun their desire to protect them. I realize that at five months into Frankie’s life, patience has thinned. My postpartum period must have ended, I think bitterly, in the eyes of everyone but me.
“If we get sick,” I say to Leo, “who will take care of our kids? Will it be our high-risk parents? And if our kids get sick?”
“I don’t know,” Leo lets out a sigh as great as the wind.
December
My anger goes for miles. Everybody is ready for this fuck-up of a year to end, and I admit so am I. There are over three hundred thousand people dead, and counting, and how many lives could have been saved if our president had worn a mask or just engaged his followers to wear them? But I don’t think in the way so many of our family and friends think, the ones who shout from the rooftops of social media, that 2020 is a dumpster fire we must all forget. I don’t think that at all. How can it be so?
My baby was born in 2020. My daughter became a sister in 2020. It was the year that we were afraid, and, even if you lost someone you loved, 2020 was the year you last had them alive.
I don’t want to burn this year away.
Is it that I am playing a sentimental game of semantics? Still, I must be clear. I don’t want to put our children’s lives behind us, the third year of my daughter’s life, which was the beginning of Frankie’s whole life, during which time Frank’s red, bumpy, newborn skin stretched into the soft dumpling of a six-month-old’s. It was the year Mona’s round, baby chin grew pointed and her brown eyes larger and more lashed; the year her pudgy legs extended, her posture shifting into a kid’s, bent and playing games on the floor, one knee up, so clearly no longer a toddler, not even close, not at all. It was the year Frankie’s grins turned into giggles; the year I tried to stop time. I snapped photo after photo of two sisters splayed out on the living room rug, side-by-side, one long, the other short, one big, the other small, but both so little, really, and both growing, ongoing, into the next year of their lives.
Marni Berger earned her MFA from Columbia University, and her short stories and essays can be found in Glimmer Train, The Carolina Quarterly, Matador Review, Barnstorm Journal, and Motherwell, to name a few. She’s the recipient of a Pushcart Nomination, and her work has been a finalist or earned an honorable mention in nine Glimmer Train contests and one New Millennium Writers contest. She teaches writing at University of Southern Maine.
