Living in Clips

I gave birth to our little girl in Paris on the 8th of March, International Women’s Day. The date felt quietly significant, a small piece of poetry in our story, almost as though the universe was marking her arrival. She arrived with a bright eyed stare, no tears, just pure curiosity. I have never been caught so completely off guard by a single glance; it is the image I carry most vividly of the day she was born, something extraordinary.

The first five days in the hospital passed by as you would imagine, in a surreal haze, as though the world outside had been paused. The sun shone brightly every day through the expansive hospital room window, as spring unfolded. I shuffled through the days in a dreamlike state, trying to absorb the rhythm of her feeds, getting use to the fragile weight of her tiny body against mine while always listening out for the reassurance of nurses’ footsteps coming to check everything was as it should be. I lay beside her day and night, unable to sleep when she did, watching her chest rise and fall with each tiny breath, still in absolute disbelief that this tiny little baby had quietly, irrevocably made me a mother. Outside, the news was beginning to hint at a world in flux, but inside our little bubble, I was blissfully unaware (in denial), cocooned in a safe space that was all ours.

Even so, the snippets of reality began to seep in through the BBC, the only English channel on the hospital television which ran news updates in the background of my first days as a new mum. There were whispers from the hospital staff to suggested that things were shifting, that the familiar was tilting toward something strange. And yet, every small gesture, every fleeting movement of her tiny hand, anchored me. It was a new kind of intimacy: raw, unpolished, and fiercely protective.

My mother had come to visit us in Paris just a few weeks before our daughter’s birth, but a nasty cough/cold she caught from Matt kept her from meeting her first grandchild in the hospital we had toured together when she had been well only days earlier. I worried she might have caught COVID, and found myself trying to care for her from the confinements of my hospital bed to the tiny, isolated confinements of her Airbnb in central Paris. The distance felt impossible.

With our tiny baby girl snug against me in the carrier, we made our way through the hospital discharge office on the 13th of March. The advisor was gathering our paperwork when she noticed a few documents were missing. I promised I would return the following week to deliver them myself. She looked at me with an expression that made me feel suddenly so much smaller. Leaning in, her voice quiet and stern, she said, “You won’t be leaving your house for a very long time. Things are about to change in the world very quickly. It is very serious”.

Her words struck me like a blow. The bubble I had been floating in, the cocoon of calm that had protected us, burst all at once. Outside, the world was shifting, and I could feel, for the first time, the weight of it pressing in on this tiny, fragile life I was carrying. I was shaken to my core, the world suddenly seemed strange and unfamiliar, everything I had just lived felt as thought it had been pulled out from under me. I had no choice but to quietly cry as we made our way home in a Taxi to our flat in central Paris. The outside world held a newfound weight and our story, fragile and tender, had only just begun.

For some of you, I only need to mention March 2020 for memories to stir — yes, I am talking about the pandemic lockdown. The hospital administrator’s words had struck me with a weight I could not shake. Images of street cleaners in Wuhan, head to toe in white overalls and masks, sanitizing the streets in huge clouds of disinfectant, played on a loop in my mind.

The first few days at home with our beautiful newborn drew me further into my phone, into a creeping, unfamiliar fear: doom-scrolling national COVID stats day and night, obsessively searching the do’s and dont’s of lockdown, trying to figure out how to protect all my closest loved ones. In that moment, the need to protect our little baby felt like survival itself. And so, on the 15th of March, when we all went into lockdown, the world I thought I knew shifted completely beneath my feet.

The first months were a fragile, suspended bubble, the months that followed brought challenges, discoveries, and lessons I never saw coming … If you would like to read more of this excerpt and my weekly journal you can subscribe to my Substack subscription for all my latest posts.