Baby’s First Pandemic

My child arrived in this world in a strange, chaotic time.

Last year, I found out I was pregnant in mid-November, two weeks before Thanksgiving. The nausea hit hard and fast and was often a signal that, counterintuitively, I needed to eat. When I did throw up, it was almost always in the middle of a meal — great for holidays with traditions surrounding food. The annual holiday gatherings were a guessing game. Would I throw up? How could I get to the nearest bathroom as quickly as possible if I felt it coming on?

For Thanksgiving, I was learning how to navigate the discomforts of early pregnancy. For Christmas, I seriously considered arriving for dinner in my pajamas — and regretted not doing so when I arrived to find that’s exactly what my brother, sister-in-law, and 6-month-old niece did. For New Year’s, I slept.

“This time next year,” my mom or brother would say as my niece babbled and played, “there will be two of them!”

I imagined dressing my growing little boy up and parading him around to doting relatives, posing for pictures as a new little family and enjoying the same traditions I had growing up. Instead, 2020 brought COVID-19 and very different holiday plans.

“It’s just one holiday,” viral posts say. Just one Thanksgiving, one Christmas out of your lifetime. I don’t disagree. But for first-time parents, it’s the first one. At my baby shower, I was gifted with bibs and stickers to commemorate all of my son’s first holidays, holidays he’ll either spend at home like an ordinary day or visiting with the very small circle we’re comfortable with. He won’t get to meet his aunts, uncles, and cousins who live out-of-state and share in the traditions passed down from our Polish ancestors — dinners of stuffed cabbage and plates full of cookies, everyone expressing their well-wishes for the holidays as they make the rounds with their oplatki wafers.

As the days pass and 2020 inches to its welcome end, precious firsts for our family — and others all over the world — are being glossed over, like a footnote in 2020 and yet another reminder of the many ways coronavirus has upended life as we knew it. New parents had visions for what they’d be doing this time of year, even if their small children won’t ever remember it.

And having lost my father to cancer not quite a year-and-a-half ago, I know all too well that seats occupied at the table one year may be empty the next — something those who have lost loved ones to the virus are grappling with, too.

For some of us, this isn’t just one missed holiday — it’s another stark reminder that we’re facing unique challenges our own parents didn’t and that our children have entered the world in a strange, chaotic time.