Featured Refresh
Text & Image
Are you doing anything artistic or creative these days that you weren’t doing before? If so, talk about it.
The pace of my life has slowed down so that I’m viewing details of things I would have passed over before Covid. I’m doing a lot of photography and zooming in on things that would have escaped notice before. When I was taking this picture I was first trying to get the quiet peace of a cow standing in the field. Zoom in to the calm nonchalance of the head close enough to pet. Zoom in on the gentle eye “the key to the soul”. With that notion, I “zoomed” in further and realized I could see my reflection on the surface of her eye. Trying to capture that shot was hard as the close proximity of the camera blocked my features leaving a blur of color and much subtler image than I’d hoped for. Each picture is supposed to tell a story and this was ours. Two beings with nothing but time to observe each other. I had the advantage, and burden, of documenting this extraordinary moment all due to the fact that so many other distractions of my usual life have been stripped away and I have time to stop and notice, and really see things around me.
November 26, 2020
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Tell us about your experiences with pregnancy, childbirth, and/or the postpartum period during the pandemic.
I found out I was pregnant ( a surprise) in July. The appointments were different being fully masked and my husband wasn’t allowed to come along. When in September we realized this pregnancy was difficult and would be filled with specialists, that proved even more difficult by having to go it alone. My husband joined me on most appointments by speaker phone or FaceTime, but as we all know from pandemic times- it’s not the same. He missed seeing the baby on an ultrasound, I missed having him hold my hand during the amniocentesis. Then when we learned the pregnancy wasn’t viable, and covid precautions prohibit a nurse from hugging you, the specialist from holding a hand, from your husband to be by your side...it adds so much to the grief and the anger. In addition to all those difficulties- due to the pandemic no one knew. No moms at school drop off noticed my growing belly, because there was no school drop off. My daughters didn’t truly understand the situation because due to covid so much was a mystery- they couldn’t join me at appointments, etc. So much was taken from us in those 5 months of pregnancy- all our hopes and dreams that came with a new baby, and all the support and love we needed from community because our community was isolated from us. We couldn’t go to a counselor together as a family, we couldn’t go to our house of worship to pray, to mourn to grieve our child. So much of the pregnancy feels like a dream- because of the isolation surrounding it.
April 2, 2021