When something monumental happens to us, the fact we are “in it” sometimes makes it impossible to realise the enormity of the moment. It’s only now, nearly five years on, that I can appreciate how big a deal it was that I had a “COVID baby”.
Over this northern hemisphere summer, social media has been documenting a mass milestone as the first COVID babies – born from March 2020 to late 2021 – prepare to start school. (In Australia, the first cohort of children in this group started school this year.)
While scrolling Instagram one chilly afternoon, I stopped on a post from Dr Becky, the account owned by US-based clinical psychologist Becky Kennedy. “Dear parents of COVID babies graduating kindergarten,” it began. I remember thinking, Wait, I have one of those – it’s me she’s talking to.
My daughter, who was born in August 2021, is starting school next year. It’s an exciting, daunting and mind-blowing time in any parent’s life. But for my friends and me, who birthed our babies in the pandemic, it’s particularly poignant.
Like many mums of 2020/21 babies, I spent a vast proportion of my pregnancy and my baby’s first months in lockdown; she was born during the stay-at-home orders we endured for 78 straight days in Melbourne.
In the lead-up to my due date, my partner and I frantically and frequently checked and re-checked the hospital’s website for updates. Would he be allowed in the hospital for the birth? What would happen to me or my partner (or the baby) if either of us tested positive to COVID on admission? And would our obstetrician, who we had (happily) shelled out a lot of money for, even be the one to deliver our baby? It was, quite bluntly, terrifying.
Things weren’t much better after our daughter arrived. My long-held dream of seeing my mother meeting her granddaughter in the hospital room had been shattered months earlier, when I realised there would be no hope of visitors being allowed on the maternity ward.
The trauma of missing out on that rite of passage hit home two years later, when I was visiting a friend and her two-day-old baby at that same hospital. After cradling the newborn and taking selfies with my friend, I sat in my car and cried for an hour, mourning what had been stolen from me, before returning home to my toddler.
Each additional week of lockdown after my daughter’s arrival meant letting go of another dream, like pricking balloons with a hatpin. There would be no baby-naming ceremony – a Jewish tradition dating back generations; no maternal-health nurse home visits; no friends dropping by to pass the time with me during breastfeeds, or to lend a hand so I could shower.
Thinking about it now feels so otherworldly, as if it happened to someone else. Reading Dr Becky’s post brought it all back. “Everybody is about to make a big deal about your kid,” she wrote, referring to the cute preschool graduation ceremonies, the children in their little caps and gowns, with their toothy (or toothless) grins. “But give me a moment to make a big deal about you. You were supposed to feel joy. And you did. It was just sitting right next to terror the whole time.”
I still can’t read these words without choking back tears.
As Dr Becky’s post listed some of the more bizarre rituals of that time – wiping down mail and groceries; going to hospital scans alone; birthing classes held over Zoom – I felt seen, but also strangely outside my own body. It’s like looking at a photo of yourself on a childhood holiday – evidence you were there, but the sounds, smells and tastes are so blurred in your memory it feels like a dream.
We parents of COVID babies all bear the scars of that time. But, as Dr Becky reminded me, few of our babies do. “There’s your kid, standing on that little graduation stage in a paper cap, totally unbothered. Because to them, the world has always been safe. You made it that way.”
Cue more tears – because she’s right. While many young people, especially those who were teenagers during the pandemic, are still dealing with the social and emotional wounds, our COVID babies are, for the most part, blissfully unaware. And for that, I am grateful.
Sometimes, my daughter finds an old photo of me wearing a mask, and, being an inquisitive Miss Nearly-Five, has questions. I explain that there was a time when many people got sick, and we wore masks to protect ourselves and people who were more vulnerable than us, but that she is safe, was always safe, and there is nothing to be afraid of.
In a few months, we will have our daughter’s first school orientation, and her kinder graduation. It’s only now that I can look back on the baby years with enough perspective to see the enormity of what I and many mothers in my cohort went through. They were indeed strange times, scary times, but also times in which we, the mothers of the year 6 class of 2033, showed the world what we were truly capable of.
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Melissa Singer is Associate Editor of Sunday Life magazine, and was previously national fashion editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
