The Hard Stuff Is Supposed to Come Later

“Have you traveled to China recently?”

No. I’ve been home, sleeping and battling morning sickness, except it’s at its worst in the evening, the way it was when my mom was pregnant with me. She’s sure the baby is a girl.

My husband and I have decided on a name for a girl, but we’re stuck when it comes to boys’ names. Paul doesn’t like most of my favorites, which range from common and traditional to unique, but not, you know, Facebook-meme unique.

“Watch it turn out to be a boy,” I say, “because we settled on a girl name.”

And so despite my mom’s confidence, I’m not that surprised to learn I’m right.

***

My mom and I wander the floors of a tea house, the old wooden floorboards creaking under our feet. I’m not a shower person—I adamantly refused a bridal shower—but I feel differently about a baby shower. After a year of cousins, siblings, and in-laws having babies, I feel like it’s my turn. I picture myself a few months into the future with a small, cute pregnant belly—far from my ultimate realty—in a comfy floral summer dress, maybe, the kinds women often wear to these events, surrounded by friends and family celebrating my impending motherhood, smiling for pictures, piles of tiny clothes and toys waiting to be packed up, taken home, and put away.

***

I consider putting off the glucose test for gestational diabetes. I don’t want to sit in a waiting room if a pandemic might be hitting our area. Maybe it’ll be better in a week.

Or maybe it won’t. I better not take my chances—if I do have gestational diabetes, I don’t want it to go undetected and untreated.

Pregnancy was supposed to be the easy part, at least in a way. Be mindful of the seemingly endless list of foods to avoid and take your vitamins. The big stuff, the truly hard stuff, comes later. But now, with a new virus tearing through the country—the world—every decision has weight. Do I have the glucose test done now? As it becomes clear that things are getting worse and not better, smaller decisions get bigger. Should I go to Target? What if going unleashes a chain of events, exposure to illness that I can never undo? The question of what is or isn’t safe is suddenly complicated. I thought I had some time before I had to grapple with decisions of what’s best for my kid beyond what or what not to eat, but instead, I feel like I’ve been thrown into the trenches of motherhood.

Paul sits next to me in the hospital lab as I sip what tastes like flat orange pop, teasing me about how slowly I drink and how I’ll struggle to do it in a mere five minutes, and we wait an hour to have my blood drawn. I use hand sanitizer after I touch anything that isn’t ours—door handles, the arms of chairs, pens.

My numbers were elevated. A week later, we go back to the hospital to find the lab is now closed—as are most of the network’s satellite labs.

The process of calling other labs to find one offering the test is a slog, and after another week of back and forth, I’m finally ready for the second test. I drink the too-sweet flat pop mixture again, only this time, it’s some sort of fruit-punch flavor, and this time, my numbers are normal.

***

When the doctor’s office calls to remind me of my next appointment, they tell me to wear a mask. I’ve put off buying one because I haven’t been leaving the house much, and my mom’s been able to keep me supplied with paper ones, leftovers from my dad’s losing battle with cancer last summer.

If he wasn’t already dead, would this have killed him?

Across the parking lot of the medical plaza, a building has been set up with a drive-up testing site. Most days, only one or two cars wait, but others, a line snakes from the front of the building to the back of the lot, down the lane separating other sections of the plaza. I count them every time, a sort of informal way of gauging the spread. The record is fourteen.

The touchscreens in the doctor’s office are covered now with a sign that says, “Please check in at the front desk,” every other chair is marked “DO NOT SIT,” and only patients are allowed in—no partners or friends or moms sharing in their daughter’s excitement or offering moral support, like Paul and my own mom both have over the last few months. At this stage in my pregnancy, things are going well. I feel the baby move often, and although he’s wearing me out, everything is fine and I feel okay about being there alone. But I think of others who might not be—scared teenagers, high-risk pregnancies. My heart aches for women who may enter the office and don’t hear a heartbeat.

“I’ve been reading as much as I can about how the virus affects pregnant women,” I say at the end of my exam. “But is there anything you think I should know?”

“We know that if you get it, it doesn’t get passed to the baby,” she says. “But try not to go anywhere. Have your husband run errands for you.” She says it with a smile that says, “Enjoy this opportunity. Prop up your feet and relax.”

***

The first few times I do leave the house, I can’t shake the strange, dystopian feeling. The streets aren’t bare, but they’re noticeably less busy. People walk around in masks. I feel like a character in a horror movie waking up to find the world has been taking over by zombies—or, more accurately, a bizarre new plague.

If I wasn’t already pregnant, I think at the beginning, I’d go back on birth control.

And so the part of me that believes that everything happens for a reason, the part of me that believes in God and maybe a little magic, thinks this baby was meant to be here, that he was meant to come to us now.

But six months in with cases and deaths climbing, hospitals filling, and no vaccine, I wonder how long one can reasonably put almost their entire life on hold.

***

“Just wait until you start showing,” my friend Emily told me early on, “and strangers start trying to give you advice.”

One of the perks of social distancing is this never happens, nor am I approached by strangers wanting to touch my stomach. But instead of sharing in stories of strangers trying to police what I eat or telling me what I should or should not be doing, I’m criticized for how I handle COVID, told in one instance that I’m “living in fear.”

But this is scary. Pregnancy is scary, especially experiencing it for the first time, my body changing rapidly in ways I didn’t expect with nothing to compare it to, no way of knowing if this week’s weird new discomfort is my body’s normal response or if something is wrong. Childbirth, especially knowing that it’s the closest a woman comes to death and knowing the country’s maternal mortality rate is rising, is scary. Being responsible for a new human life is scary. Navigating all of this during a pandemic of a new virus, with new information on symptoms and long-term effects coming out and changing weekly, is scary.

Every time someone suggests that it’s overblown, that precautions aren’t necessary, I want to scream, “But I’m pregnant!”

To protect my child, I have to protect myself, and I have to rely on other people to do so—rely on them to follow guidelines, to get tested if they’re sick, to stay home if they’re positive. As people refuse to wear masks, insist the virus is no worse than the flu, or more alarmingly, insist the whole thing is a hoax, it becomes clear that I can’t.

***

My phone pings with a message from my best friend—a screenshot of a Facebook post criticizing a Target store for roping off baby strollers and car seats, deeming them nonessential goods. Parents and other caregivers are angry, and so am I. Among the concerns COVID-19 has added to pregnancy, I did not expect one of them to be the possible struggle of actually preparing for the baby. To new parents like us, who do not already have these things, they are essential items.

An acquaintance disagrees.

“People shouldn’t be taking their babies anywhere right now anyway,” she says.

“What about doctors appointments?” my friend asks. “How are people supposed to bring babies home from the hospital?”

In a separate post, a man shows no sympathy for the struggles of managing pregnancy in a pandemic.

“Pregnant women should’ve planned better,” he says, as though I and countless other parents-to-be in the same situation somehow knew this would happen.

***

I hold out as long as possible before admitting that the cute tea-house baby shower I dreamed of isn’t going to happen.

I send my mom a screenshot from Facebook of a drive-by shower, a growing pandemic trend.

“Too bad we can’t do something like this.” We live on a windy road with little room for people to stop.

“But we could do that here,” she says. Her neighborhood is more closed off, with more space and less traffic.

Over the next few months, she asks about things like favors, decorations, and food, putting more thought into it than I expect and, if I’m honest, more than I care. But I’m excited by the thought of having something close to a normal shower. The feeling that I’m missing out wanes.

We find invitations with masked safari animals saying, “Celebrate safely with us.” We do our best to make it as close to a normal baby shower as possible, with what is essentially a bagged lunch with a sandwich, chips, cookies, and cupcakes, all individually wrapped.  The favors follow a theme of hygiene and cars, with hand sanitizer, soap, lotion, and keychains. We award prizes for decorated cars, for the furthest distance traveled, even at random. We try to make it worth the trip.

When some of our drive-by guests are impressed, Paul jokes, “If we did all this for a drive-by shower, imagine what a normal one would’ve been like.”

I don’t expect many people to come, but I’m surprised to be proven wrong. Some friends and relatives have driven an hour or more, which seems like a lot to me, and so the time people are taking means more than it might have otherwise.

***

“As a precaution, all women are being tested for COVID before they’re induced,” the doctor says.

“I think I’m more nervous for this than I am about giving birth,” I tell Paul as we sit in the line at the drive-up testing site, the one I’ve seen across from my doctor’s office for weeks now. People who have been tested describe it as very uncomfortable, with one woman in a viral video comparing it to being poked in the brain.

I tilt my head, trying to catch a glimpse of the process being done on someone in the large pickup truck ahead of us, but I can’t see anything other than the staff member covered in protective gear.

When it’s my turn, she smiles through her plastic face shield, takes my prescription, and makes smalltalk with me, asking me the gender of the baby and when I’m being induced. I’ve been taking COVID seriously for months, but seeing the precautions the staff has to take to test people makes it clear just how serious this really is. If it were “just the flu,” they wouldn’t cover every inch of their bodies. I wonder if with each test, she’s nervous, if she goes home every night wondering if today was the day.

She takes a long swab—it reminds me of a tiny toothbrush—and shoves it up my nose. I instinctively close my eyes but do my best not to resist.

I start coughing when she finishes, and my eyes water.

“That was the worst,” I say to Paul. “Talk to me in a few days, and I’ll let you know if childbirth is just as bad.”

***

When moving through the hospital, Paul and I have to wear masks, but once we’re in our room, we can take them off. The staff, though, wears them constantly, and because I’ve never given birth before, it doesn’t seem that strange.

Still, with each nurse that parades in to check on me or to help usher Charlie into the world, and later, to help me learn to breastfeed him, I wonder what they look like without them, if under normal circumstances I’d be greeted by warm, smiling faces. I think about the fact that if we have another baby in, say, two or three years, that might be the way things are then, and I’ll find that weird instead.

When my niece was born, Paul and I visited a couple times over the weekend, once bearing a plate of homemade muffins. Now, hospital policy is no visitors, and Paul can’t leave—at least not if he’d like to come back. Our families’ first glimpses of Charlie are in cellphone pictures and Zoom calls.

The hospital is quiet, and I feel like we’re in our own tiny world. Since Paul can’t leave and no one can come in, the hospital provides meals for both of us, and we eat together at a little table in the corner while Charlie sleeps. We rarely check social media, and the only TV we watch is the hospital’s newborn channel, which offers tips on care, and some Law & Order reruns. COVID feels distant, even though patients may be receiving care in the floors below us. Has anyone been admitted with COVID? Is anyone in the ICU? While we’re new parents in awe of our first child and the family we’ve become, is someone else dying alone?

The usual practice of having a photographer take pictures of newborns has been abandoned, so we try to take pictures as a memento of our first hours and days as a new family. They’re candid, perhaps more intimate than posed photos would’ve been. A close-up of Charlie’s tiny round face, eyes closed, a little red mark between them eerily similar to one I was born with but which has since faded. A shot of the back of his head, showing off his unexpected red hair. Charlie in the hospital bassinet wrapped in his blue and white plaid swaddle with a little blue crocheted hat from the hospital as Paul looks over him, beaming, his hair long and curls jutting out after months without a haircut. The three of us on the last day in the hospital, me in a robe that matches Charlie’s swaddle and Paul in a similar T-shirt.

“You guys are so cute!” our nurse beams.

We look tired and unkempt, the lighting a little dark. We dress Charlie and put him in his car seat, ready to leave the closed-off, sheltered space of the hospital and head out into a chaotic, uncertain world.

-Janelle Sheetz

Janelle Sheetz lives with her husband and now one-year-old son in the Pittsburgh area. Her work has most recently been featured in Change Becomes You, Atta Girl, and A Parent Is Born.