Protecting patterns

The worst thing about quarantine for me is the fear of other people. With the baby, it’s so acute, it’s sometimes physically painful. I was walking down the street alone with the baby on a rainy day once, carrying an umbrella, and a beggar approached me trying to sell me something. I actually spun the umbrella out in front of me, between my body and his, and said please, stay away from me. I was a little surprised to see this reaction emerge from my body, but it didn’t feel bad, it felt like the right thing. I was not about to let this stranger near my child. 

This has been the thing about being a new mom in a pandemic: it has brought me in touch with this feral protective impulse. The only thing uglier than following this impulse (as demonstrated above, when I put a physical barrier between my baby and a person in poverty) is what happens when I suppress it. That’s really unpleasant, the feeling of being impotent in the face of a threat to the little one in my arms.

When I was pregnant and trying to figure out how I wanted my delivery to go, how I wanted my space to feel when I came home from the hospital with a newborn, when I embarked on this new life stage, the thing I kept coming up with was a bear. I wanted to be like a mama bear in her cave, deep underground, fed for the winter, and safe in the darkness. I spoke about this with a friend, and she said, well, you know what to do about boundaries. Everyone knows what happens if you piss off a bear. She was right about bears. Bears have courage, and I wanted to summon courage.