What Kind of World is My Baby Going to Enter?
Pregnancy during a pandemic — and looking into a spinning unknown for the future — is not exactly what I would have chosen.
We started out by joking about the globally significant events that dominated the headlines when we were born. Race riots, O.J. Simpson, Chernobyl, the ill-fated Challenger. Dark humor, maybe, but as history geeks who met at a Civil War reenactment, this is par for the course for my husband and me. This baby, we laughed, would have the 2020 pandemic to remember! It would be a mile-marker by which we’d look back and say, “oh, yeah, the coronavirus. You weren’t born yet, but Mommy was pregnant with you when that was happening.” It would be a thing of the past, an anecdote for “this day in history.”
Then it dragged on and on and on.
What started as a presumably brief stay-at-home order stretched into weeks. And now months. The news reports became more dire. The economic threat loomed. The anger rose. The death toll climbed.
In light of what the world at large is facing right now, anxiety about being pregnant in a pandemic seems almost trivial. High-risk concerns aside (admittedly, these are growing too), I can’t help feeling a little silly for dwelling on the implications of what this means…
