Pregnant During a Pandemic
Photos/Reannon Muth.
By Reannon Muth
“Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl yet?” The washing machine repairman asked from where he stood inside my small galley kitchen. His gray uniform shirt had the name “Joe” stitched onto the front of it.
“Oh! Um, it’s a girl. My first,” I said. I touched my stomach, feeling awkward.
Talking about my pregnancy still felt new and strange even though, under normal circumstances, it probably shouldn’t have. At that point, I was six months pregnant—and looked it. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Like everyone else, I’d barely left my house in months. Conversations with strangers, when they happened, were kept short. “We’re not accepting cash – only credit cards,” a convenience store clerk might say, not looking up from bagging my water or “Is this the end of the line?” a harried-looking woman might ask as we queued six-feet apart outside the Whole Foods. No one asked me how far along I was and few offered their congratulations. It would seem that people were too focused on their own lives; their own private worries, to take any real notice of one another.
But who could blame us. Las Vegas was facing record unemployment. Casinos had been shuttered. New rounds of layoffs were being announced every week. Videos of “nature reclaiming the Strip” surfaced on social media, showing a mother duck waddling down the middle of a vacant Las Vegas Boulevard with her fluffy ducklings in tow. Our city had become unrecognizable.
“We were trying to have a baby,” Joe the repairman said. He didn’t look up from the invoice he was filling out. He had a buzz cut and the chubby, unlined face of a young man that looked to be fresh out of high school. “Me and my wife. But then with COVID, we decided maybe it wasn’t good timing.”
I knew all about the perils of planning your life around “good timing.” When my boyfriend (now fiancé) of three years and I first decided to get pregnant, we thought it was the perfect timing. We both had solid jobs with good health insurance. And being in our late 30s, we were both in stages of our lives where we felt more than ready to start a family together.
We found out we were expecting the same month that we found out about the virus. At first, we didn’t think much of the mysterious illness with the beer-brand name. This was back in March when the Coronavirus felt far, far away; when the worst symptom seemed to be a “quarantine-induced boredom” that led people confined to micro-apartments a half a world away to create elaborate mazes for their pet mice. It just didn’t seem real at first.
But then my boyfriend lost his job and a month later, I lost mine too, and suddenly, the virus had hit home. When my boss called me to tell me the news, I’d burst into tears. I’d been working from home for several weeks at that point and had suspected I might get laid off, but I still hadn’t been emotionally prepared to hear the words “we’re going to have to let you go.”
“What are we going to do?” I’d said to my boyfriend after I’d hung up, my head in my hands. It felt like I’d just been dumped in the worst possible way—kicked out of a car and abandoned in the middle of nowhere without a clue about what to do next.
We were already struggling as it was. Both of our cars weren’t working, and our dryer and washing machine had broken down on the same day. What’s more, we had discovered some black mold in our kitchen and all of our cabinets as well as the kitchen wall were going to need to be replaced. How were we going to pay for all those repairs on top of all of our other expenses? And what was I going to do when my health insurance ran out at the end of the month? I was pregnant—It wasn’t as though I could go without healthcare for long.
So much for perfect timing, I remember thinking. I’d always been an anxious person but up until that point in my pregnancy, my worries had been vague fears about childbirth. As I laid awake that night, however, my anxiety finally had something concrete to focus on. For the first time since the pandemic began, I felt a genuine panic.
And yet, life went on. In the weeks that followed, I filed for unemployment and applied for government health insurance. While I waited to hear back, I struggled to find my footing in this new world of face masks, toilet paper shortages, and long lines into the grocery store. Being pregnant, I knew I was extra vulnerable but I also didn’t want to overreact—both for my sake and the baby’s. I knew needlessly stressing out wouldn’t help.
I stayed home most days, venturing out only to go to the one dog park in my neighborhood that had remained open or to my many doctor’s appointments. At first, they allowed my boyfriend in with me to my ultrasounds, but after my pregnancy was determined to be high risk due to a genetic predisposition, I had to go in alone. As I watched the fetus squirm on the monitor, I thought about all the normal pregnancy things the virus was threatening to rob me of: Shared ultrasound appointments, shopping for maternity clothes, “babymoon vacations,” visitors in the delivery room, a traditional baby shower. The ultrasound tech took a video of the fetus holding up a finger in front of her face. I imagined she was sending the world a peace sign, but a friend on Facebook who saw the video suggested that she might be giving the world the middle finger. Given the year that humanity was having, both interpretations seemed fitting.
One morning in August I was in the dog park with my 60-pound Irish wolfhound mix, Bowser. It was one of those early summer mornings in Las Vegas when the heat hadn't made an appearance yet and the sun was just beginning to turn the brown valley mountains a pretty golden pink. Bowser was sitting before me with a wide smile and a look of joy in his big, expressive eyes. And it occurred to me that Bowser had no idea the world had been falling apart; from his perspective, the world had never been better.
And I knew then that my view on my less-than-desirable timing was a perspective as well—one that I had the power to change. I could choose to focus on the negative—my dwindling savings account or the frustrating lack of job prospects, for example. Or I could choose to focus on the positive, like my good health. Now that I wasn’t working, I had the time to eat healthy, exercise daily, and take naps whenever I felt sleepy; all things that would help both my mental health and the baby’s development. My boyfriend and I were also fortunate in that we’d both qualified for unemployment. I’d even been approved for health insurance. Life wasn’t looking so dire anymore.
If COVID-19 had taught me anything, it was that you shouldn’t waste your one wild and precious life waiting for the stars to align exactly before you follow your dreams. If there’s something you want to do, you’ve got to do it—timing be damned. Because you can think you’ve planned for everything, only to have a once-in-a-100-year pandemic throw all those carefully laid plans out the sanitized window. I explained as much to Joe.
“I don’t think there’s any such thing as good timing,” I told him. “If you want to have a baby, you should. Things will work out.” I touched my belly as I spoke.
I gave birth to a healthy baby girl on October 21—my birthday. As the nurse laid her on my chest, I pulled away my face mask to peer into her slate-blue eyes and thought about what a strange point in history she’d been born into. She would be joining me in a self-imposed quarantine, where her world would be my small town house and strangers’ faces would be shielded from full view with a piece of fabric.
“Welcome to the planet, Journey,” I said. We’d given her a name befitting an adventure seeker. She was our brave little explorer about to navigate an uncertain world.
My fiancé and I still don’t have steady work, and I have no idea what the future holds for us. But this much I do know: There may be no such thing as perfect timing, but the journey of life continues in its own beautifully, imperfect way. All we can do is hold on and hope for the best.
Reannon Muth is a writer, social media marketer, and graphic designer whose writing has appeared in numerous print and online publications. Originally from Hawaii, Reannon lived around the world before settling down in southern Nevada. In her free time, Reannon enjoys traveling, hiking, and hanging out in the Arts District in Downtown Las Vegas. You can read more of her personal essays on her travel blog, TakenbytheWind.com. Reannon has also written a memoir, which she expects will be published this spring.
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