COVID robbed me of both of my maternity leaves, is that why I want baby #3?

Is anyone still talking about COVID in 2023? Between incessant interest rate hikes and “1-in-100-year” weather events, Covid seems the least of our worries – or at least it’s fallen down the pecking order. But can I talk about the C-word for just a moment? Humour me.

You see, I was lucky enough to have not one, but two “COVID babies” (aka babies born between 2020 and 2022). And truly I do mean lucky because I know just how blessed I am to have two healthy babies, and will never, ever take that for granted. But I have a little bone to pick, because having not one but two stints of maternity leave during a global pandemic has left me feeling, well, a little ripped off.

Life before the pandemic

Let’s rewind to 2019 – PC. Pre-COVID. Like many people in their early thirties, I was in the thick of wedding season. We had our dream wedding – with not a single thought of superspreaders or postponements. We even honeymooned in Europe. And then, we excitedly watched as two blue lines appeared on a pregnancy stick. Life was about to get wild! Little did we know just how wild it would be.

We did what many apartment-living Sydney-siders with a baby on the way do. We panicked, desperate to upsize and get into the housing market before it was “too late”. As luck would have it, we found our dream home on the “other side” of the Harbour Bridge in the Sutherland Shire – a sea change as I like to call it - and put our northside apartment on the market. At thirty weeks pregnant, we bought and sold a house, all in the same week. Two weeks later, the first case of COVID-19 hit Aussie shores. There’s that word lucky again.  

I’m sure many of us remember those early COVID days. There was a lot of nervous energy as we checked daily cases online, still in the single digits in Australia at this time. Many of us were sent home from work – “WFH, how good!”. We all perfected homemade banana bread. But then, life as we knew it really started to change.

The first lockdown in NSW was short and sharp – about four or five weeks from memory. Restaurants, gyms and “non-essential” shops closed down. Social gatherings were banned – no baby shower for me! According to government health officials there were only four reasons to leave the house. Remember how we could only exercise with one other person from our household?! Wild times indeed.

Third trimester in lockdown

Honestly, at 30+ weeks pregnant, I was pretty happy to stay home. No long commute to work, plenty of time to nest. I was tired, and an empty social calendar meant weekends were for much-needed rest before baby arrived.

But, as hospitals started to clamp down on their visitor policies, my calm state quickly turned to concern. “Would our families be able to meet their first grandchild at the hospital?” “What happens if one of us gets COVID?” And then… “Will my husband even be allowed at the birth?!”. Communication and guidelines were confusing and changing daily. At a stressful time where everything already feels a bit unknown, things suddenly became very uncertain.

My last few months of work were strange. I logged into my laptop, sitting on a fit ball at my dining table. Colleagues watched my bump grow via Zoom meetings, and there was no final work farewell as I started to wind down ahead of bub’s arrival. It was all very…anti-climactic.

On 31st May, 2020, at 37 weeks and 4 days, I gave birth to a healthy baby girl. We didn’t catch COVID, my husband was there for the birth, and we spent four blissful, uninterrupted nights in hospital getting to know our precious baby. In hindsight, the lack of hospital visitors was a beautiful blessing and allowed us to truly stay in the newborn bubble.

Maternity leave, round one

As any new parent will know, bringing a newborn baby home from the hospital comes with a lot of anxiety as you hover over them checking they are still breathing 4 million times a day (and night!). Throw in a deadly pandemic, plus the start of winter (hello, cold and flu season), and you bet we were on edge.

The good news was that some of the government restrictions in Sydney were starting to ease, which meant we were allowed a handful of visitors at home. It’s safe to say A LOT of hand sanitiser was used in those early weeks!

As we settled into life with a newborn, and my husband returned to work, I started to get my first taste of life on maternity leave…sort of. My plan was to have 12 months at home with my baby, which I am incredibly grateful to be able to experience. My plan didn’t quite involve multiple lockdowns, face masks, virtual mother’s groups and cancelled milestones.

Luckily, I had a few close girlfriends have babies around the same time. We texted day and night, sharing our fears, worries and achievements for that day (a hot shower, yay!). While writing this story, I asked a couple of them to reflect on that, err, unprecedented time.

“For me, the hardest part was my pregnancy as I wasn’t able to see anyone. I didn’t have a baby shower with friends or at work, and it felt we never really got to celebrate the pregnancy or birth of my first baby,” explains Nicola. “Once bub arrived, everyone was apprehensive about visiting so family support was lessened.” She could also see the silver lining. “The good part about not having visitors in those early days was that it allowed us time to get established as a new family unit. I also didn’t have to worry about being well presented or having a tidy house.”

Another close friend, Bec, expressed the loneliness of her maternity leave. “I expected to bond with like-minded mums in the area and build lifelong friendships, but it’s just not the same catching up over Zoom with an unsettled baby on your lap. I felt isolated and alone, trying to navigate motherhood without support.”

I had other friends whose parents had not yet met their own grandchildren as international borders remained closed. Even interstate family were shut out. While we are all thankful for modern technology and the ability to Facetime friends and loved ones, as any parent knows, that first year is fleeting. You can’t rewind the clock to capture those newborn cuddles…that newborn smell!

Where was our village?

Before you think we’re all having one big fat whinge, believe me, I’m under no illusion that maternity leave is all cafe dates and shopping trips. It’s not a holiday - far from it - and certainly not a relaxing “break” from work as some well-meaning co-workers jeered as they waved me off for 12 months.

In fact, whether you have 3 months or 3 years off paid work while growing and raising babies, maternity leave is a strange and beautiful combination of slow, repetitive days and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments. You spend 90% of the time slouched on the couch or cross-legged on the floor with a small human attached to you, and the remaining 10% Googling why said small human won’t sleep, eat or poop. What makes it somewhat more manageable, is having a support system – a village – to hold you when holding a newborn 24/7 feels near impossible.

Those first few months - the fourth trimester - are like walking through the world in a sleep-deprived trance - foggy, lonely and somewhat detached from normal society. It’s also life changing and soul affirming, which is why a global pandemic adds a heck of a lot of stress and uncertainty to this already complex time.

That first year of my daughter’s life was one for the ages. She spent 159 days in lockdown, which might not mean much to a small baby, but as her parents, we felt every day of it. I kept a journal to be able to show her one day, and reading it back, I couldn’t help but feel teary – and proud – of how we thrived survived.

Back to work…sort of

By June 2021, it was time to return to work. A job I absolutely love, with people who are like family. Like most parents who are going back to work, I had mixed emotions – fear, sadness, excitement.

My daughter was being cared for by her grandparents, and I had flexible, hybrid work arrangements, allowing me to work from home a few days a week. Well, I didn’t need to worry too much about that. After just 10 days back in the office, I was sent straight back home, as NSW entered yet another lockdown. This one would last four months.

This time around we weren’t baking banana bread and taking up new hobbies. We were done – especially our friends across the border in Victoria who spent a total of 262 days at home during six, yes six lockdowns!

We were told to wear a mask, stay home, don’t travel more than 5km. Businesses collapsed, jobs were lost, people got sick, really, really sick. It was tough. That “village” that parents rely on to get by…gone in an instant. There’s a saying that mums are expected to work like we don’t have kids and parent like we don’t work. Well, here we were working and parenting on top of each another in one very dishevelled living room. Having my husband work from home made it simultaneously easier and harder as we tried to learn this new dance called remote work meets child rearing.

Maternity leave, take two

About six months after returning to work, I fell pregnant again. Like most second pregnancies, it was a whirlwind of appointments and scans in-between raising a busy toddler. We were still in and out of “snap” lockdowns, which meant no partners or children at any doctors appointments – yet another logistical nightmare to juggle.

When COVID restrictions eased, I went back into the office (masked-up of course), only to be back working from home a few weeks later due to case number ramping up again. Colleagues expressed that it felt like I only just had baby number one, after all, they had barely felt my presence in the office as we all sat working from our dining tables for months on end. It was tough, to know that I had barely dipped my toe back into the workforce only to sit on the sidelines again. I questioned my value and worth as an employee, only to then feel guilt for wanting to stay home with my young family. An absolute emotional rollercoaster!

The birth of my son in July 2022 coincided with the worst cold and flu season in Australia in years. Two years of COVID and now a severe flu outbreak. Wonderful. Once again, hospital restrictions were in place and once again we weren’t allowed any visitors to meet our baby boy. Rather than enjoying the peace and quiet, I felt acutely aware that the other half of my heart, my daughter, was at home and it was the longest we’d been away from her.

Thankfully, the country was not in lockdown and borders – both interstate and international – were opened. COVID was still around, but life felt relatively normal…a new kind of post-pandemic normal, I suppose. My son caught COVID at around four months old, but it was thankfully relatively mild compared to the daycare germs my daughter brings home every other week.

These days, café dates and shopping trips are few and far between – wrangling a toddler and a baby is hard enough at home, thanks, and I’m relying on my small, but supportive village to help ease the physical and mental load, if and when they can.

Round three?

So, as my second-born approaches his first birthday, I can’t help but let my mind wander to baby number three. Would I do it all again, just to experience a “stress-free” pregnancy, birth and maternity leave in a post-pandemic world? Is that even such a thing? After all, COVID is still kicking around, we’ve just learnt to live with it.

When I posed this question to my girlfriends with young children, the answer was an astounding “hell no”. Some are still scarred, others are D.O.N.E and others, well, they felt their birth and maternity leave experience was perfectly imperfect, just as it was. No need to rewrite the narrative.

And me? One thing I’ve learnt about motherhood is that no one has it “easy”. Some people certainly have it harder than others, but at the end of the (longgg) day, motherhood is messy, unpredictable, lonely and exhausting – pandemic or no pandemic. But my gosh, I love my little people and would do it all again, a million times over, just to experience that feeling.

Written by Brooke Delfino