2020: Becoming a mother in a pandemic

So much can and will be written about 2020. A year that forced the entire globe into a simpler rhythm. A year where touch became illegal. A year that closed borders and made all of us hibernate.  

For me, it started in Tunisia. A short-term contract that filled me up with unexpected joy: coffee on terraces, the blue of the Mediterranean sea, blindingly white houses and carved blue shutters, cats on every corner, the sense of the Arab and European worlds colliding. Tunisia flooded me with reminders of why I love the work I do, of why I have moved countries so many times. My artist room mate made me feel instantly at home and my team at work was warm, passionate and opinionated. The work was intense, but that led me to fall even more in love with it all - as we pushed to create stories of peace in Libya and Algeria. I felt like a recovering addict returning to the welcoming fold of their drug of choice. After a year and a half of "balance" and "reflection" since my motorbike accident, this was my first return to my "old life" - a life I'd convinced myself I'd grown out of. However, when confronted with the familiar all consuming breathless drive to learn about a new place, new team, new context, I came alive again. And, I realised I couldn't stand the idea of turning my back on this entirely. 

The tension between the "balance" I've found since the accident and the adrenaline fuelled highs of my "old life" forced some honest conversation between me and Da Berg, who is most at home on the coast of a UK shore. He visited me in Tunisia in March for a week of travel through the Sahara. While we drove, we talked. Honesty brewed a sense that we were at a crossroads - could we accept each other? Could we find a path that navigated my wandering feet and his sense of groundedness? What I loved most about my beloved was also what I found most different from myself. 

As he left, the pandemic hit. My parents took the last flight to Tunisia before the borders closed. There, for a holiday, it soon became clear the chances of them or me getting out again had drastically diminished. With all flights cancelled and COVID restrictions tightening we spent a frantic few days searching for a way out. After several failed attempts, we finally got the three last seats on a French evacuation flight to Paris and onto London. 

Pandemics concentrate minds. They pose the question: who is your nearest and dearest? Where do you want to be when the world contracts to four walls and you're unable to leave your home for anything other than 'essential travel'? And for me, it was abundantly clear. For all the unresolved questions of how to balance an international life with a British one, I only wanted to be with Da Berg. For all the adoration I had for Tunisia, he was the answer and Tunisia was not my home. I passed straight through London to arrive in Broadstairs, our home away from home. My beloved was waiting and we hibernated together, glad for the lack of interruptions. For the first time in our lives and our 18 years of friendship we lived in blissful isolation. COVID offered us another gift too. In our endless walks along the windswept cliffs we talked about how silly it is to believe we can control anything. COVID showed us fragility. It showed us, if you want something, you must do it, immediately. You shouldn't wait for the 'perfect time' - there is never a 'perfect time.' And so, in the midst of the pandemic, we became pregnant. 

Once one decision is made, more decisions follow, like dominoes. And so it was with the pregnancy. My commitment phobia was swept away, as we bought out my brother's share of the the flat we own in London and decided to completely refurbish it. We created a shared bank account. We talked about wills. We tied ourselves together. And, I felt a liberation in decisiveness that I've never felt before.

Ironically, just as we were pulling ourselves ever tighter to each other, we were forced to live apart. My beloved had decided he would undertake much of the flat renovation himself, alongside his brother. So, while I moved to my parents for a month to avoid the chemicals, he and his brother began the renovations. That was back in September. Now, 6-months on  my beloved and I are still torn between Wales and London and the flat remains a building site. 

Throughout it all I continued to work on Tunisia. From April, just as everywhere else in the world, all work was remote. Endless zoom calls kept my colleagues and I in touch. As my belly grew, I found myself still tied to North Africa. While lockdown, after lockdown kept me in Cardiff, my beloved learned plumbing and ripped down walls and ceilings and rebuilt our floors. While I fell to anaemia and had to begin my maternity leave early, it was fast becoming clear that perhaps I would not be able to give birth in London after all. 

After three months apart, and with government COVID restrictions constantly changing, we were determined to spend Christmas together. Da Berg arrived in Wales just as the government cancelled Christmas. Thankfully that meant he was there on Christmas morning at 4am when I woke up in a pool of blood. We set off for the hospital. COVID meant, that like all my scans and hospital appointments, I went in alone. I was also alone an hour later when they scanned my womb and declared the placenta to have detached from the wall of the uterus. Immediately, they told me they would be performing an emergency C-section. I asked if we could wait for my beloved. I was told it was impossible. When the mothers and/or child's life is in danger, they try to perform the caesarian within 30-minutes. And so, 22-minutes later, our son was born. Da Berg arrived with minutes to spare, just as they cut into my belly. Our little one arrived with a cry, but struggled to breath, so was whisked away to the neonatal intensive care ward. As I lay, still paralysed from the waist down, I strained to see him. I asked Da Berg why we'd waited so long to do this. 

A surreal day followed. As the drugs wore off and the pain of the caesarean took hold, I struggled to get out of bed. Each time, I found myself too dizzy to get into the wheelchair, and each time the nurses told me, they could only let me go to the neonatal intensive care unit once they knew I could get into the wheelchair without fainting. I was no longer pregnant, but I no longer had a child. My beloved was able to visit him however, and like so many things this year of virtual meetings, I first connected with my son via a whatsapp video call - Da Berg phone placed inside the incubator, while I told him how happy we were that he was alive. 

At 4am the next morning I was finally able to get into the wheelchair. I wept when I saw him - an animal cry. He was so tiny, pink and covered in tubes. I asked if I could hold him naked against my skin, and when I held him the world turned somersaults. I knew I needed to sleep, but all I could do was bask in our son's presence. He smelt divine. His warmth fitted so neatly into my own. He filled a gap I didn't know I had. When I finally left, the nurses later told me, our little one ripped the air pipe from his nose and breathed independently.  The days in the hospital were nightmarish. Da Berg wasn't allowed in because of COVID restrictions. My body ached. I struggled to stand, to walk. The pain felt intense and every three hours I clambered into a wheelchair and up several floors to visit my little one. I cannot remember night from day, as I tried to pump my breasts into producing milk, that we fed by tube into my little one's nose. Pumping and feeding and trying to get him to take to the breast left no time to eat, to rest, to think. It was a blur and the third evening I wept: Frustrated that my beloved was unable to be there; Angered that I was in my own ward, without my baby; And devastated that little one was alone in an incubator. Finally, they released our little baba to my ward and I was able to hold him when he cried. A week of endless feeding followed. Feeding and the purple light to break down his jaundice. That, and pumping and engorgement and pain and hospital Christmas pudding and custard and treacle tart and measuring millimetres of milk eaten and more blood tests to check whether he was putting on weight, whether he was getting over the jaundice, whether he could go home. The midwives were kind as I struggled to get him to take the bottles of breast milk I pumped every three hours. I barely slept, but the adrenaline and oxytocin was enough to keep me as high as a kite - in wild love with this child. 

On New Year's Eve we were released. Just as 2020 finally left us and as COVID deaths dominated the headlines and Britain was plunged into another dark lockdown. Yes, there was a vaccine, but for now, we must all stay locked in our homes, surrounded by a grey, damp winter. For our little family, none of that mattered. We were home. We were together. And our little one was feeding. Yes, my nipples were on fire. And yes, he had reflux. And yes, we were actually in my parents' home - the renovation was still not complete, but it didn't matter as long as we were together. 

Our son is now 7-weeks old. We're still down in Wales for the foreseeable future. My beloved is still back and forth to London, trying to finish the refurbishment. There is still no kitchen, no bathroom, no heating, no floor up in London. But, in the meantime, I try to put one foot in front of the other. To look at this baby and breathe him in. To count the blessings of having grandparents on hand. To walk every day, with my best friend from childhood, who has been stranded with her parents next door since COVID last March. To follow the coup in Myanmar in a surreal reminder of a world I left years ago, that still burns inside me. To reflect on what it means to have a child. And to look at him in wonder. To see this miracle and fill my lungs with the sensations and experiences of these endless nights. 

Others will wish to forget 2020, but in many ways COVID set the scene for me to become a mother, and for that I will always be grateful.