Anxious, competitive and isolated

How Covid put us all on maternity leave

Losing track of time. Watching the clock, which never seems to move. Feeling isolated. Feeling anxious. Feeling invisible. Feeling guilty. Trying to cram too much into too little time when the clock inexplicably moves too fast. Worrying about whether your colleagues are missing you, or whether they have forgotten you even exist. Worrying about whether you might lose your job or be replaced. Worrying about not being able to squeeze into your old work outfits. Those are all things to do with lockdown, right? Actually, no. They are mostly from a list titled “The 10 hardest things about maternity leave” published in 2019 by online pregnancy magazine The Bump.

Lockdown (which is still with us because even though the more stringent restrictions on movement have been lifted, many people continue to work from home and avoid social gatherings) has put everyone on a kind of maternity leave.

The similarities between mass lockdown and maternity leave go way beyond a new fondness for elasticated pants.

At the end of March, most employed adults — men and women, parents and the childless — were shunted off the workplace merry-goround, sent to their separate homes and told to remain there until receiving word that the playground was open again.

In the beginning, there was a strong sense of unity in this mass isolation. Comfort was delivered in the form of amusing memes and messages of support, and advice on where to find bootleg alcohol and the best recipes for foolproof banana bread.

There was an odd sort of equality in this situation — certainly not financially but in the sense that the same prison sentence had been imposed on us all. In every community, people worried more about each other. Many who had the means to help those in need did more than they usually would to share their largesse. People learnt to speak on the phone again rather than just texting. Board games and other oldfashioned family activities were resurrected. Cooking and baking and crafting have never been more popular.

But as time wore on and lockdown was extended, the sense of being separate-but-together began to wear thin. Tedium and fatigue set in. So did paranoia. Even though you knew in your rational mind that your colleagues were all in similar circumstances, all isolated, that’s not how it felt. Many of us had the illogical suspicion that everyone had reconvened in the office without telling us and that we were the only ones still communicating via Zoom and WhatsApp.

Absurd questions plagued us in the small dark hours. When I hit “end meeting”, does everyone else get up from their desks in the same building and gather around the coffee machine to catch up on gossip? Do they talk about me? Worse, do they not talk about me? Is someone else sitting at my computer? Does anyone even remember what it is I do? As ludicrous as you knew it was, there was a feeling that the rest of the world was having a party to which you were not invited.

This, according to the memoirs of many mothers, is pretty much what happens to women on maternity leave. Even in the days when visitors and baby outings were allowed, the sense of being shut in and shut away intensifies the longer it goes on. The excitement and newness fade and boredom and loneliness set in.

As happens after a death, well-wishers flock around after a birth only to disperse and become absorbed back into their own lives while you are left holding the baby.

The postpartum depression suffered by many new mothers has biochemical origins but is exacerbated by isolation. When lockdown began to lose its novelty value, similar mentalhealth issues emerged. People felt frustrated, powerless and, in some cases, on the edge of insanity.

Insomnia is another factor. New mothers don’t sleep, either because the new baby does not sleep or because they are on constant high alert lest anything happens to it while they sleep. Under lockdown, many of those who previously had no problem sleeping found themselves afflicted by insomnia at night and unable to concentrate properly during the day. This was partly a result of heightened anxiety. As well as worrying about the coronavirus and worrying about what other people might be doing without us, we were worried about whether everyone else was doing everything better than we were.

This applies equally to new mothers and the locked-down. The fierce rivalry between parents of infants is rarely voiced but it most certainly exists. She says her baby sleeps through the night; why doesn’t mine? Hers is already smiling; why isn’t mine? Is it gaining enough weight? Am I a bad mother for feeding it formula instead of breastfeeding?

Lockdown anxieties were also both large and small. The small ones went like this: my neighbour has put his bicycle on bricks so he can put in as much road time as he used to without leaving the house; should I do that too? How am I going to get enough steps in to keep up my Vitality points if I can’t go outside to exercise? Why does my boss’s sourdough bread look so much better than mine does on Instagram? Am I sanitising my groceries properly? Should I get the same fancy mask as Betty ordered from the chemist or is mine effective enough?

And then there is the guilt. Mothers who grumble about not getting enough sleep or feeling useless or anxious about what will happen when they go back to work will very often preface or follow up their tirade by saying: I really shouldn’t complain. I’m one of the lucky ones. Women who aren’t in formal employment have to go back to work the day after giving birth or they won’t get paid. And they are also lucky compared to women having to look after babies in terrible circumstances with no income.

The same holds true for lockdown. All the concerns mentioned above are decidedly middle-class, and for most of us the guilt was just as present. Complaints about pineapples and yeast not being available for delivery were accompanied by shameful remonstrations with oneself about those who do not have jobs, or had lost their jobs, those who were somehow having to survive lockdown not only without comforts and amenities but often without proper shelter or food.

But humans are paradoxical creatures and we are also creatures of habit, so it was not surprising that some of those who loathed lockdown at the start became more drawn to it as it became more familiar. As restrictions eased, some chose not to leave the house, even though they could. Many had legitimate medical concerns and other reasons for remaining in self-isolation, but it served only to increase the anxiety that everyone on the outside was having fun or getting ahead without you.

Some women who take maternity leave say they get to a point where they resent outside contact as much as they crave it. They don’t want to feel forgotten but at the same time it is not helpful or edifying to hear about all the fun your friends and workmates are having, or all the things they are achieving, when you’re stuck at home with a creature that cries instead of speaking and can’t hold its own head up without support.

Which brings us to the infant. Lockdown felt as though the world had given birth to a strange alien baby and everyone was sent home to nurse it. Which in a sense is true. An egregious conflation of circumstances gave birth to a microscopic virus covered in spikes. This virus has become all our responsibility. We may not have chosen to go on maternity leave to take care of it, but we have all been charged with the raising of it. Some will leave it to its own devices and it might turn into a psychopathic killer. Others will do all they can to contain and restrain it and teach it manners so it becomes a creature that can live alongside others in a new world without harming them.

There are a million books about parenting skills and child-raising out there. The guide to raising a well-behaved coronavirus is still being written. Everyone needs to read it when it is complete because this little bastard is going to be living with us, and off us, for a long time to come. How it grows up is entirely up to us.

Lockdown felt as though the world had given birth to a strange alien baby and everyone was sent home to nurse it. Which in a sense is true. An egregious conflation of circumstances gave birth to a microscopic virus covered in spikes. This virus has become all our responsibility