Reflections on a lockdown maternity leave

 

By Jenni

In March 2020, we all faced an unthinkable reality that we couldn’t have foreseen short months before. We were locked down in our homes and cut off from family and community in a way unprecedented. At the time that this took place, I was 8 months pregnant awaiting the arrival of my third child who was born on 17^th May towards the end of the first round of strict lockdown measures. Next week I am due to return to work, almost nine months after her birth, still facing the lockdown restrictions that we had hoped may have been a short-term reality, stretching on into a still uncertain future.

I could tell you of many different small daily struggles and anxieties that have occurred for me and my family over the past year. I could speak of how I faced a deeply uncertain labour through the first lockdown, of midwives shrouded in PPE, masking the reassuring smile and touch that we depend on when facing pain and trauma. I could talk of the long, repetitive and monotonous days with three small children without the relief and burden sharing of baby groups or the mind-bending exhaustion of sleep-deprivation, teetering on the brink of depression, without relief from grandparents to take the baby whilst I napped.

But of course, we all could share these stories together. The toll of trauma and the pain of isolation and separation has attacked us all in significant ways, to the extent that what I may once have considered unbearable sadness and struggle for myself now melts away on reflection of others who have met with much greater sadness and pain over this long year.

Of all these small struggles that I have experienced through a maternity leave of lockdown, the greatest has been the loss of community in which to raise and nurture my baby. I write this as a love letter to our greatest shared asset, our stronghold of hope, now buried in the ground like the daffodil bulbs, but ready to spring into glorious yellow with the spring. The wonder and precious lifegiving resource that is the Church!

My family are part of a small local church here in Old Swan, Liverpool. We can walk from our font door to the door of our building in about 7 minutes and the majority of our church community are a short walk away from our home. This church is not internationally renowned, draws no great crowds of people, hasn’t had a YouTube streamed service during lockdown as the 50 or so of us that make up this church can more easily interact on Zoom. But what we may be lacking in glamour, is made up for in warmth, multigenerational community and that irreplaceable quantity of being known. We journey together, share our pain, hope and fear all within the love of Christ who we humbly seek and try to follow.

When my first two children were born, they joined with me in all the aspects of a life spent with the Church. They joined in with Sunday meetings where they would be minded by their surrogate grandparents; bible studies and community gatherings filled with surrogate aunts, uncles and cousins in Christ; prayer groups where they would crawl around on the floor and disrupt most attempts at sustained prayer together but be picked up and cuddled and nurtured by loving carers, nevertheless. They wouldn’t be offended by the noise but received their presence with joy. They made little friends in the toddler group, where they would sit and be noticed and cooed over by other parents, sharing in all the love and affection of local community, held and cuddled by a neighbourhood who could be trusted to love them and wipe their snotty noses.

Perhaps most beautifully, they would spend time with the vulnerable. They sat in highchairs near the isolated, people experiencing homelessness, those struggling with mental health issues who came into our church building to eat with us. When my older two were very little, I used to call them my ‘smile evangelists’ because of the way in which they were able to offer a simple, innocent act of friendship and welcome by smiling at the whosoever who came near. They were a witness of hope and new life to those who had faced repeated experiences of hopelessness. Granting an act of acceptance without judgement which offered a simpler reflection of Christ than any that those of us who had been attempting to follow His way for decades could manage.

If you had asked me then, if I would have liked to spend more time alone with my family, I would probably have thoughtlessly and arrogantly said, ‘yes! I’d love a rest and some time alone with my family!’ But I would not have known just how precious the resource was that I dismissed far too easily. I have come to feel its absence deeply over the past year of having and raising a baby without it. Of course, in so many ways, the church has proved its mettle through this year. Going online, embracing Zoom, furiously continuing the prophetic act of prayer through WhatsApp. I have not been completely alone. Those surrogate grandparents, aunts and uncles, still meeting with me through video calls, encouraging me with text messages, dropping off gifts and encouragement to my door.

But I have realised that nothing can replace those acts of physical presence and touch that are provided by a loving church and local community. Most significantly, I have noticed the lack of being able to share the joyful growth of my baby with others. In a church community, a baby arrives as a promise of hope and source of cuddles and comfort for all generations. The joy of having a baby yourself is richly enhanced by the joy that those early cuddles and smiles bring to so many others when they are shared. Each milestone is noticed and remarked upon by a whole community of people who have a deeply vested interest in the growth of your child. You are not alone in the daunting act of raising a child and perhaps most importantly, your child is not alone in the daunting act of growing. They are valued and cherished by a community of many generations, who in turn are able to share in the re-lived joys of childhood. In these ways, the church reflects the deep joy that is to be found in a shared mutuality of giving. The sharing of arms who can hold and hands which can wield tissues, is matched by the sharing of hope found in early smiles and first steps.

I have felt the vacuum of this mutuality and shared presence immensely in this year. I have raised a baby without the immediate warmth of church community and have missed it immeasurably. There have also been two other babies born and raised in our church during this lockdown whose presence I and my family have equally missed their cuddles, smiles and early walking steps.

I could continue to lament this loss and indeed, reflecting on Joel 2:25 this year to me does indeed fell like a year that ‘the locusts have eaten.’ But the additional joy that I receive in being part of Church is the hope that we share, that we speak of to each other, that we pray for together. This hope assures me that God indeed will ‘repay for the years the locusts have eaten’ and I await with immense excitement the days that are coming where, ‘I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions’ (Joel 2.28). Knowing my church community as I do, I know that this is just beyond the horizon.