The Isolation of New Parenthood During the Pandemic

This completely different person I’ve become since I gave birth is someone virtually no one knows.

The photographer Rose Marie Cromwell documented her experience giving birth and her growing child during the pandemic, in a series called ‘Eclipse.’ All photos: Rose Marie Cromwell, from the forthcoming book ‘Eclipse’ from TIS books.

By Sophie Gilbert

In early March last year, I was heading home from a work happy hour on the subway when I realized that a woman was staring at my belly. She looked at my waist, where my coat was belted, and then at the floor, and then at my waist again, and then she very tentatively offered me her seat. I was four months pregnant. (I’d also eaten a lot of fried food at happy hour, in lieu of drinking.) I felt pitifully grateful to this woman at the time, and I ended up thinking about her a lot in the following months. She was really the only person — apart from my husband, my obstetrician, some nurses, and my doormen — who ever saw me pregnant. My mother didn’t. My siblings didn’t. My best friends didn’t either, or my co-workers, or any other kindhearted strangers on the subway. After the second week of March, I stopped going anywhere apart from occasional doctor visits and walks around the city. In July, I gave birth to twins, and then I stopped going anywhere at all. “You take those babies home and you keep them there,” the head nurse at Weill Cornell Medicine told me, and that is exactly what I did.