Story #66 - Postpartum Pandemic Stories - A Dialogue on Coping Mechanisms - Lexie, Petaluma CA
Running on the Half-Empty Glass
A friend of mine wrote to me at the beginning of the pandemic. In another life, we used to live next to each other, and our girls hung out all the time. She'd bring me cupcakes on Monday mornings, and we'd have coffee while watching out kiddos strip their clothes off and hose their butts on the balcony, squealing and hugging in the cold water.
Lexie moved a year ago to Petaluma, CA. Her husband is Coast Guard, and she's a west coaster, an adventurer, the kind who used all her savings to buy an RV and is waiting for her husband to retire so they can travel around the hemisphere with their spunky four-year-old.
She writes:
"We live on a military base. We are fortunate, in so many ways, to be in California, where the weather is warmer. Our base has plenty of outside space to play and explore. I need to focus on the good, and not the sadness. But you know what? I'm human. I tend to run on the half-empty glass, and I'm the pessimistic one in our home, so trying to focus on the good is hard.
We were supposed to spend a week traveling the pacific northwest in our new camper van, showing our daughter all the beautiful places we talk of often: the beach we named her after, the city we love, the coast that takes our breath away.
But we canceled the trip because of COVID19. Because it was the right thing to do. We care about others in our society, and we wanted to do our part. But it broke our hearts. Our four-year-old doesn't quite understand but knows enough. Her sweet little soul went with it, and to make up for it, we spent two days on the CA coast last week. No one close by. We parked away from other cars. Social-distancing way more than 6 feet. It eased the pain.
But yesterday, my heart shattered again, and I'm in tears: they've closed the CA coast. I sit, thinking to myself, HOW can they close a beach? The one place I counted on, the one place that soothed both my soul and lifted my daughter out of the funk, is now closed. National Parks: closed. Local parks: closed. COVID-19 has closed nature. Excuse my language, but what the fuck?"
This postpartum project has mostly been focusing on newborns and very young children so far. But as a parent of toddlers myself, I tend to think that my postpartum period never ended, but rather shifted. From sleepless nights I now count the hours before bedtime so I can rest again. Preschool and playdates replaced the feeding schedules. Like everyone else, I took these breathers for granted. The mental load of the daily activities and entertainment lifted for a couple of hours a week, and that felt great.
After much consideration and discussion, Lexie had resumed her career as a math teacher in December 2019. She said to me,
“I worked only three days a week, which was a perfect fit for our family. It felt amazing. I was back in the 'real world,' and I had a greater purpose. I wasn't just doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, and chasing a kid: I was working my ass off to help these students. Students who usually started the year with substitute teachers, if they were lucky. Students who, as freshmen, were introduced to high school math in a shitty, empty, pointless way. Students who had a rocky middle school math career and who distrusted me for the first 6-8 weeks.
I worked hard to earn their trust, build relationships, and make math meaningful. These students are now gone, and I probably won't get to see them again. I won't get to tell them, in person, that I'm proud of them, and that I want them to succeed. That's my biggest regret.
It is raining out today. Most families would snuggle up, watch movies, and sip hot cocoa in between bites of popcorn. On a typical Tuesday, we would instead have gone out in the drizzle after dance class. We would have put on rain pants, raincoats, and headed for the beach. We are adventurers. We believe that there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.
The beach would have been gloriously empty for our exploring."
Of course, as parents, we enforce "physical-distancing" from others—note that I'm not using the term "social-distancing"; humans are social animals, we need some form of interaction with others and, to a certain extent, with nature. It fills our cup. We are no different than any other species on the planet.
Of course, we try to grab our kids' arm to get them to stop running (amok) when someone else walks by on our daily exercise-walks. But we don't always succeed. To contain children inside the house is as ludicrous as "closing nature." And yet, here we are. Homeschooling and caring for infants and toddlers fell suddenly on the parents' lap. The mental charge of mothers skyrocketed, adding to their already endless "to do" list.
So it's not because we honor the rules that we are not grieving our usual outlets. It's not because the right thing to do is to stay home that, some days, we don't feel like spiraling into a deep, deep funk, or a depressive state of mind.
The sadness is real. If you are privilege enough to have space for it, let it be real.
There is no hierarchy in suffering.
People grieve and cope differently. It's not because your neighbor has it rougher than you are not allowed to some form of rage, terror, sorrow, or excess.
There's no right or wrong way to "do" a pandemic.
And because Faces of Postpartum's mantra has been "We're all in this together" since its foundation, let's start an upgraded list of coping mechanisms and outlets. Not to add to the burden, but to lighten it.
Share the good, the bad, and the ugly.
I'll write mines in the comments. I hope you follow along.