We recently had a little family Harry Potter moment when we realised what people have been saying about little D — that she looks exactly like her father, but has her mother’s eyes. D may not have had a birth as (fictionally) historic as baby Harry, but she is certainly living through historic times since her birth, living through these strange and turbulent times.
It feels like both the best and worst time to be a new parent.
Best because of the new little world of our own, the smiles and gurgles, and the sheer lack of time that makes you forget the pandemic the world is battling. Worst because even a simple ride down the elevator with the baby feels like a battle with a virus, seeing the graphs rise in the newspapers every day, and dread whenever a message flashes on the apartment WhatsApp group dedicated for Covid updates.
The past few months have been a strange mix of anxiety about the outside world, and blurring it all out in a whirlwind of milestones, joy, soiled diapers, sleepless nights, schedules, and living life in a new way that would have been unimaginable a year back.
The second week of January, when D was born, I recall glancing at the newspaper in the hospital (yes, I somehow managed to do that, I don’t know how or why) and was still learning that there was a new virus in a place in China called Wuhan. I’ve now almost forgot this place existed. This has absolutely nothing to do with us, we thought. We have far more on our mind, we thought. The next two months I barely read the papers, and used all my phone time checking internet advice on ‘is it normal for babies to burp loudly’, WhatsApping other new moms, and watching Netflix episodes in 5-part installments.
While the virus was spreading to the US and Europe and India got a few isolated cases, I finally read about the coronavirus properly only in March when D turned a momentous three months crossing the so called ‘fourth trimester’. It started to seemed like maybe, just maybe, this is a big deal. I did one of my doctor visits wearing a mask, wondering if I looked like a fool. We had a family get together planned that month, and it started hitting us that this could be something serious, and we probably shouldn’t have people coming in from all over the country from Maharashtra and Gujarat. We cancelled that too, wondering if we were overreacting.
I remember the strange feeling when we read about the first case in Bengaluru of the ‘techie’ who came from the US and went shopping and watched a movie and there was a detailed list of his movements in news articles. It’s so near now, we thought, when it was all of one case around 40 kilometers away in Whitefield. Slowly new words came into our vocabulary, quarantine, containment zones, then lockdown.
The full lockdown now seems so distant, at a time when cases were still in double digits in the city. It all felt dystopian- passes to get around the city, hospitals that weren’t taking any non essential cases (all new parents had one major question for each other- what to do about vaccinations?!), no Amazon deliveries at the drop of a hat.
We were careful about our rations, planned our grocery shopping to the T, used minimal utensils knowing that we’d have to clean it all up, and tried to generate as less waste knowing that garbage collection may stop. D was thankfully not yet on solids, making lockdown shopping so much less stressful.
The lockdown phase, we heard no vehicle horns and didn’t see a soul or step out of the house for weeks. We didn’t go on walks or even to the terrace with the rules in our apartment. Our house doesn’t have a proper balcony but just a shaft-facing utility balcony, which made us feel all the more restricted. The one outing I made to a clinic for vaccination, I remember the eerie feeling of looking at all the closed shutters, barricades, masks, and the baby in my arms- is this the world she’s going to be seeing?
Today, we’ve moved from there to 10,000 daily cases in my city and suddenly all this is again in the past. We have a dozen e-commerce deliveries every week (as assorted as clothes pegs, yet another stash of baby wipes and hair bands), we can go around much more, travel between cities and countries have begun. We’ve started going on short walks in the afternoon when there isn’t a crowd, carefully steering away from others. But we are nowhere near a post-Covid world.
If I think about it now, how did we get from there to the present, and still remain quite normal? How did we accept all these new words and new world so quickly — social distancing, institutional quarantine, self isolation, Zoom meetings, online school? If someone had told me I’d be dealing with a pandemic along with new parenting, I’d have imagined myself to be a scared mess.
But somehow, we all seem to have adapted. It’s now been around nine months — equal to the entire duration of my pregnancy, that we haven’t gone out for an outing, a meal, a movie, a concert, a train or bus ride, shopping. We did two trips to a small lake for a morning walk and ordered a pizza one time — the peak of our ‘recreation’. Otherwise, days go in the routine of chores and baby care, work in our respective ‘home offices’, watching some shows after D’s bedtime, planning things day by day.
There are times when it is stifling. Never, ever getting a break from home. Tip-toeing during naps, eating every single meal at home, attending work calls from the same room without any of the banter that comes with a physical office, laundry, cleaning, barely getting out of house clothes. And unable to figure out ways to contain all that energy that comes with each phase of babyhood- crawling, standing, walking.
Anxiety about Covid is a strange thing. On some days it appears like everything is changing, and you want to change everything. Am I being cautious enough? Other days feel like I am taking it all too seriously — it’s just a flu after all. Or is it? How can it be something to not worry about when it has thrown upside down this year the way we live?
The thoughts of babies growing up in this period is overwhelming. I wonder if D will grow up differently being stuck at home for the most part of her first year, when I would have probably seen a hundred people by my first birthday, attended family events and big weddings, and even travelled to another city, been on a train, seen the sea. When this little brain is processing so much, isn’t there more we should be showing her than the crows and trees outside the bedroom window and the cars downstairs?
I am eager to see how it would be when she finally meets a bunch of people without masks and who can come close and talk to her without me holding my breath. I want to know what it’s like to go to a big public park or a restaurant with a baby. When she sees children nearby and reacts cooing and squealing, I wish we could go nearer and talk and let her interact. But we stand anxiously at 6 feet distance, or even further if the masks arent worn properly.
While we trudge on in this ‘new normal’, there are certainly some great parts to being a new parent in this time. The work from home, especially for the dad in all these months, has given us much more quality time with the baby than we imagined. A chance to enjoy each moment and each milestone, to share duties better, to get to be close to people who matter the most. A chance to focus on the baby and cut out much of the noise of daily chaos.
A chance to rethink a lot of things like how and where you want to be living this life, that can turn upside down any time.
But in the meantime, I cannot wait to show D little bits of the world that she’s not getting a chance to see. To go beyond the confines of our apartment complex. To step on wet grass, to hear how animals sound, to go to the beach, to look out the window of a train. To see other homes and families and babies, to actually go out for at least enough time to warrant taking a diaper bag.
Historic as these times are, I cannot wait for them to pass.
