What on earth have I done?

All of us are, no doubt, trying to process how this pandemic is going to shape our shared future. Will we truly “live” more online, even with the shelter-in orders are over? When will we go back to touching one another without flinching? Will public spaces ever actually feel clean? Will beloved local businesses survive? Will a generation of college kids feel the lack of a pomp-and-circumstance ritual so acutely they fail to launch?

But perhaps there is no one asking more questions, with more urgency, than the pregnant among us. They are literally walking around with the uncertain futures inside of their bellies. One such person, my dear friend Allison Cook, and I have been in conversation about this. After our last 6-foot apart porch chat, I asked her to write me a letter about what she is thinking, and this is what she wrote—such a gorgeous meditation on what she’s going through, what we are all, in fact, going through from a certain angle.

I’ll answer it tomorrow.

Allison with my youngest, Stella.

Dear Courtney, 

What on earth have I done? 

A few nights ago, I woke up sometime near 3 am - my whole body pulsing with the conviction that I’d made a terrible mistake. I repositioned the wedge-shaped pregnancy pillow that Dan and I have affectionately dubbed “the sleep slice.” My doubt didn’t shift quite as easily. 

Tears dribbling awkwardly back towards my hairline, I lay there in the dark and ached with my own foolishness. I berated myself, “How could I have thought that it was a good idea to get pregnant?” I rested my hand against my pregnant belly and felt it jostled by the not-so-tiny kicks of the tiny human I’ve been growing inside of me.  I couldn’t take it back. Here I was - here I am- nearly seven months pregnant while the Coronavirus pandemic upends almost everything. 

I thought that I had made a certain kind of peace with having a child in the age of global catastrophe. Having spent nearly a decade working on environmental issues, I did not take the question of parenthood lightly. Eyes wide open to the climate crisis I’d inherited and contributed to,  I had staked my claim on the side of hope. Yes, I was bringing a child into a world full of suffering, but also we would muddle through this together. We would be awake and alive. We would make mistakes. We would show up. I would show up. I would become a mother. In a project that seemed almost too easy, I got pregnant. 

In the intervening months, I have spent countless hours researching glass baby bottles and cloth diapers, and seeking out crib mattresses free from brominated flame retardants. I cast spells with each keyboard stroke that my vigilance and obsessiveness would protect this new life. Being pregnant had created in me an extraordinary feeling of vulnerability that simultaneously terrified and awed me.  I started using crosswalks. 

In the midst of this crisis, that feeling of rawness, of moving through life with my heart splayed open has only intensified. 

I am now facing the prospect of delivering this baby alone in a hospital staffed by impossibly overworked doctors and nurses. I am revisiting the possibility of the homebirth that I thought I was too anxious to follow through with. I also know that I’m incredibly lucky - I am healthy and working and my job-supplied health insurance is very much intact. And still this isn’t the project that I thought I signed up for and I’m so afraid. 

I’m afraid to be so dependent on a healthcare system that is so clearly so broken. I am afraid to be so fragile. 

This morning the outdated calendar alert on my phone dinged with the reminder that I’m supposed to be in Los Angeles right now with  my mom and my aunties cooing over me and telling me how “fat” I’ve gotten. Dan and I have stopped bickering about the baby shower that I didn’t want in the first place. Nearly everyone we know everywhere confined to the four walls of their homes. 

I am one of those women who has always wanted to be a mom and I’ve always been nervous about it - worried I was too impatient, too quick to anger, insufficiently generous. And the thing that pushed me through the anxiety was knowing that I would be held in the mundane miracle of parenthood by a phenomenal community of family and friends. And I feel a lot less certain about that right now. It’s not that I don’t feel supported - I can stand six feet away from you and know that you love me. I hear it in my sister’s voice as she offers to call a midwife she knows or when a new friend drops off a breast pump and velour maternity leggings on my porch. But it’s different. I want the reassurance of your long hug, I want Stella to put her hands on my belly and check if the baby is still there, I want to make art with Maya while we make creative additions to the list of baby names. I want the gathering. I want the holding. I want the community of bodies. 

This is all so different than what I thought it would be and I don’t know what comes next. But maybe that’s just what parenting is?

Wishing we were talking this out sitting shoulder to shoulder on the stoop. 

Love, 

Allison