Did the pandemic want to change your life? – Wired PR Lifestyle Story

In the early days of the pandemic, when Noa, a seven-year-old child, and I were on daily walks, we saw father and son next to them. Like all parents with only children, I felt a touch of love for both of them: the father was doing his best in a pandemic, the baby seemed about five years old, he was also doing his best, with no other children behind him. The mother was nowhere in sight. I created stories about them: Maybe he was a doctor who was working? Maybe he was immunocompromised and couldn’t get out of the house? Maybe he was the only father? Maybe the child had two fathers and the other was an indispensable worker? The options seemed limited and I was sure that in time the mystery would be revealed.

One day, I saw the couple enter the building across the street and soon appeared in a window on a flight. So do they were our neighbors! I don’t know why it brought me peace of mind, but yes. Assembling the neighborhood puzzle pieces was my new concern.

One summer day, Noa and I went out on our balcony and she was singing and dancing Hamilton. Father and son were theirs and were encouraged. We said goodbye, said hello, we found the kids going to the same school, a year after the boy Noah. It was hard to have a conversation shouting from balcony to balcony in the traffic below, but we tried. A few weeks later when George Floyd was killed, his father also stood out at night holding the light in the sky for nine minutes.

As the months went by, a strange and secret attachment arose for me to this family, their trio a little mirror of ours. I liked to spy at night, the lights in the apartment lit up. Was the child bouncing on the walls? Was he alone? Were they getting it? I rarely saw anything but I liked knowing they were there.

And one day the father appeared on the balcony with a small child.

So there was the mother: kidnapped inside, safe from the virus before giving birth. “Congratulations!” I suddenly shouted across the street to this stranger who was not like us, busy with the task of keeping him alone in a pandemic. Now he had bigger concerns, or maybe others. “Thank you!” she said, lifting the wrapped baby and smiling. I tried to pick up the baby’s name and I think I picked up something for being a girl, but it was hard for me to hear it from balcony to balcony again and we finally made gestures and went inside.

Last April, kidnapped at home, the longing for another baby came to me again. It is true that it has never disappeared. I did a good enough job of erasing it in time to run out. I did a good job of justifying our choices, seeing the beauty only in ourselves, reminding myself of the ease and depth of having one, the many complications of another.

But when the roar of Covid came, the need came again in a kind of mania, a last-minute panic. My daughter’s existential loneliness seemed unacceptable and unavoidable to me and my fault. It was here, on my face: in a pandemic, it was on its own. Yes, of course we were here, but until when? And when we were dead?

You will get pregnant and by the time you give birth all this will end and then you will stay home with a baby, said the mother in April 2020, never pragmatic. Let it go.

He is right, I thought.

Of course, none of us knew it then, but those who started the pandemic with that thought – I should have a baby anyway – they have now been in the most difficult of circumstances. Not the first women to give birth in harsh conditions, of course, but still.

The baby across the street is growing up. I see a combination of family members on the balcony almost every day. I see them at night, sitting at dinner, with the baby on their father’s lap or on the couch with their mother. I see a little boy running around the apartment. I wonder how things are going, how things have changed. I imagine my mother’s tiring nights. I represent my son’s jealousy and love for his sister. When I finally asked my father how they were doing, he laughed, shrugged and pointed at the world and we both nodded.

Perhaps the isolation of recent years – of unfiltered equality – has taken us into ways we have never done before: having a large or small family, living in a city or farm, far or near the family, marrying this or that person or anyone else. Never before have the greatest choices in our lives — a couple, a child, a job, a location — been seen in such intense relief. And also in a crooked way. We don’t make decisions in a vacuum. However, this is how our decisions have turned out, the background – as a fixed piece – has drifted away. We just stare at each other. Aupa, aupa. This is our life.

And yet, to be the ambivalent mother of an only child is to see couples everywhere; it is to make endless and useless calculations – if we were to try again when he was three or four or five years old; it is worrying that he is getting more and less than he needs; it’s the fear of being loved too much and the fear of losing too much; it’s about playing in head-to-head battles and getting your face painted with it, because who should you do it with? For someone else you knew it was a matter of worrying about where you would put your love bookings; we hope you are doing what all parents do: knowing the best we can with what we have achieved, which is often too much and not enough.

Abigail Rasminsky is a writer, editor and professor based in Los Angeles. She teaches creative writing at USC’s Keck Medical School and writes a weekly newsletter. People + Bodies. He also wrote about this marriage, motherhood and the bagels of the neighbors.

PS Nine parents talk about having an only child, and how did you know you were ready to have a baby?

(Photo by Jimena Roquero / Stocksy.)