Motherhood, memories and musings through Covid - Part 1: Into the Unknown
When I was a teenager, I worked at an organisation that offered spaces to community groups to gather and meet. Walking to one of our storerooms one day, I scooted past a group of mothers with young babies, sitting in a circle and talking about sleep, feeding and routines. “How boring,” I thought, “I don’t think I’ll join one of those groups when I have a baby.” Fast forward several years and contrary to my naïve expectations, my mother’s group and playgroups were some of the bright sparks in the early days of my introduction to parenting. I found connection, support, ideas, validation and friendship while navigating sleep and feeding, and learning about this little person who had turned my life upside down.
Our expectations of what motherhood is like can, for some, begin before we are even pregnant. We develop ideals, hopes about our baby, what maternity leave may be like, how we’ll spend our days, and the way we will orient our lives around this new addition. This is in part fuelled by the explosion in social media in the past decade. No longer do we have to seek out what motherhood will be like in the pages of magazines and books with which we purposely chose to engage. Now, for better or worse, we see motherhood and families represented in our social media feeds as we scroll by. And due to that ever-omniscient algorithm, the minute we like or interact with one post on a certain topic, a plethora of other related content will be offered up. So as soon as we start to google baby names, or research heartburn during the first trimester, our mental musings are slowly shaped by these offerings of what our future is about to be like. We see cute clothes, deluxe nurseries, pictures of parents pushing their babies on the swings at the park, first birthday cake smashes, and an overall plethora of highs and lows of what awaits us following the birth of a baby. We begin the world of parenting with a whole set of implicit and explicit ideas of what this new phase of life will be like.
And yet… two years ago, Covid-19 arrived and changed the world as we knew it. Social distancing and mask wearing became the norm. We spent months separated from friends and families. We worked from home. We postponed weddings and major events. We celebrated Zoom happy hours, drinking wine with friends, but separated via a screen. How we interacted with the community at large changed considerably. There was an immediate shift in how medical and allied health care services were provided. In the arena of pregnancy, birth, and the early postnatal period, support services were restricted and limited in terms of face-to-face, hands-on care. Services were moved online, reduced in capacity, or cancelled altogether to comply with public health mandates. While the extent of these restrictions were experienced differently across Australia and for different time periods, it still stands that for many parents who welcomed new babies into their lives for the first, second, or even fifth time over the past two years, the landscape of parenting a new baby has profoundly changed, leading to notable impacts on parental mental health.
Indeed, there has been an array of research published around the world within the past two years investigating the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on family and parenting experiences. Studies indicated that becoming a new parent, or parent again, during the pandemic was associated with anxiety and fear about future engagement with health services; feelings of isolation and loneliness and, disappointment at missing out on both formal and informal services, supports, and connection with others. Already a time of heightened emotions and stress, the pandemic soured many expectant and new parents’ experiences of having a baby, with the research suggesting a particularly negative impact on first-time mothers. None of these findings will likely be a surprise to new mums reading this.
“There is no manual for grief and loss, no guidelines for restoring all the intangible things that never came to be. So perhaps, we must make the road by walking.”
What, then, do we do now? The pandemic was not a small blip on the timeline of our lives but represents a seismic shift in life as we know it. We did not wait out a few weeks of disruption before returning to the normal routines and rhythms of our lives. Time has trekked on. Seasons, events, and lockdowns have come and gone, babies were born and have grown taller and bigger and older. Some mums and dads have only ever known parenting during a pandemic and have now had multiple children born into this strange new world. Meanwhile, we are left with the grief, disappointment, regret, and loss of the experiences we felt promised, were meant to have, or deeply wanted. What do we do with this? We can’t go back in time, there is no rewind button. The research suggests that “compensatory social and emotional support should be considered” (Chivers et al., 2020), with an increased need for enhanced mental health resources and supports that reduce stressors and create effective strategies that mitigate the deleterious impact of the pandemic (Adams et al, 2021). What this looks like, however, isn’t clear. **
“Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road– Only wakes upon the sea. ”
How do we even make the road? Part 2 out on the 13th June.
Disclaimer
The contents of this blog are not prepared as definitive statements or prescribed instruction for your personal or professional circumstance and no guarantee can be given that todays discussion is free from error or omission. The diagnosis and treatment of mental health challenges requires the specific attention of a GP or other properly qualified mental health professional engaged to treat your personal circumstance in the appropriate setting.
Masters & Co., all employees and agents shall accept no liability for any act or omission occurring as a result of reliance on the information at this workshop and for any consequences of any such act or omission. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis please contact LIFELINE on 13 11 14 (Open 24 hours) or contact admin@masterspsychology.com.au for more information.
Bibliography
Report no. 7: Becoming a new parent in the COVID-19 pandemic: Insights on the Australian family experience: Families in Australia Survey 2 | Australian Institute of Family Studies (aifs.gov.au)
Motherhood and medicine in the time of COVID‐19 | The Medical Journal of Australia (mja.com.au)
Motherhood in the Time of Coronavirus: The Impact of the Pandemic Emergency on Expectant and Postpartum Women's Psychological Well-Being - PubMed (nih.gov)
Becoming a mother in the 'new' social world in Australia during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic - PubMed (nih.gov)
Perinatal Distress During COVID-19: Thematic Analysis of an Online Parenting Forum - PubMed (nih.gov)
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on maternal and perinatal health: a scoping review - PubMed (nih.gov)
Coping with Covid-19: stress, control and coping among pregnant women in Ireland during the Covid-19 pandemic - PubMed (nih.gov)
Isolation, anxiousness, depression: What it's like becoming a mother during the COVID-19 pandemic - ABC News
Parents Are Stressed! Patterns of Parent Stress Across COVID-19 - PMC (nih.gov)
Whitman, W., 2019. Song of Myself (1892 version). [online] Poetry Foundation. Available at: <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version> [Accessed 27 April 2022].
Baby Showers: a Rite of Passage in Transition | ACR (acrwebsite.org)
Pascoe Leahy, C. (2021). Maternal heritage: remembering mothering and motherhood through material culture. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 27(10), 991-1010.
Harris, R. (2012). The reality slap: Finding peace and fulfillment when life hurts. New Harbinger Publications.
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