Women of the Pandemic

by Lauren McKeon

  The Second Worst Day arrived in May. Bruvels was exhausted—a thing she feels almost silly saying. But she was, there was no escaping it, and one night she forgot about the hot water running into her bathtub. It overflowed, streaming through the light fixtures below, raining into her son’s bedroom. He screamed that the house was collapsing. Bruvels ran to the bathroom, through the sloshing water, wrenching the tap. It was too late. The flood was catastrophic. Parts of the ceiling had buckled; pieces fell. The bathroom floor would have to be completely torn up, discarded. Later, when they needed something to laugh about, they joked that, because they couldn’t travel, they brought Niagara Falls to them. Because that’s what it had looked like: a rushing, deafening waterfall, sprung in their own house. Bruvels lives in a subsidized co-op, and they demanded she pay for the extensive repairs necessary to make the house liveable again. CERB, a school scholarship, and her paid job as a teaching assistant had given her a better cash flow than she’d had in years, but the idea of being able to afford the repairs still seemed laughable. There was just no way, and besides, her lease dictated she should be off the hook. So, Bruvels packed some clothes and other belongings for her and her son and moved in with her mother.

  When I spoke to her months later in early August, she was still there, her own home a wreck. She’d had two weeks to work on her art while her son was in camp. She wanted nothing more than to continue to immerse herself in her school work, to paint, to feel the physicality of it, the empowerment, the joy. She felt frustrated, and maybe a little angry, that her professors and others were treating her as if, in asking for support and accommodations, she was looking for an easy way out. Taking stock of her life over the past few months, she knew nothing felt easy at all.

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  As provinces and territories began to close school doors in March, many parents—and particularly mothers—felt their days fracture. Unexpectedly and unwillingly they became math and English teachers, task managers, cafeteria cooks, classroom peacemakers, tech support, and home-school principals, all rolled into one ill-equipped package. Child care, already notoriously expensive and inaccessible, became obsolete. Mothers who worked at home were forced to teeter between staff Zoom calls, homework questions, meltdowns, work crises, laundry, lunch, the laughability of nine to five. Mothers who still worked outside the home were forced to make impossible decisions, beg favours, place heavy responsibility and the burden of grow-up-fast on their children, change shifts, quit jobs. Other mothers found themselves newly without income, navigating it all with one eye on their bank accounts.

  Many parents, no matter their gender, felt the bruising pressure of the pandemic. There’s no doubt fathers, and particularly single fathers, felt the pain, too. There’s also little argument that, as is often the case, mothers felt it more. It should also be underscored that some mothers, including single mothers, racialized mothers, low-income mothers, and mothers parenting children with disabilities, experienced an even deeper strain. But few mothers had it easy. One in-depth May 2020 study by the U.K.-based Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that mothers were 23 per cent more likely than fathers to have lost their jobs during the pandemic. And, adding to the sting, mothers in the U.K. were also nearly 50 per cent more likely to have permanently lost employment, or to have quit. Throughout all this, they were looking after their children for an average of 10.3 hours every day, about 2.3 hours more than fathers. Mothers also, perhaps unsurprisingly, did about two hours more housework every day. If you’re keeping track, that’s twelve hours of non-paid work; now (try to) add to that a 7.5-hour workday, plus time to eat, sleep, go to the washroom, get dressed, breathe deeply, cry silently.

  Then there’s the labour that’s more difficult to gauge in hours and percentage points: the emotional management of a home swiftly changed by worldwide trauma, illness, fear. Worrying about how to make everything all right when nothing is all right. Explaining to your four-year-old why they can’t see their friends or hug their grandparents. Trying to reassure your ten-year-old that their grandparents won’t die, even when you’re anxious about that same thing, even when it seems like everyone might. Telling your sixteen-year-old they’re not invincible, even though you desperately wish they were. Attempting to console your partner, live with their anger, love them, protect yourself, confront your constant proximity to each other. Wiping tears from chubby faces, properly oohing and aahing over Play-Doh masterpieces, gluing googly eyes, finding that one episode of that one show where the character does “the thing,” chasing away nightmares, mediating sibling battles, baking the good cookies, giving a hug.

  None of this work can be fully measured, not really, but there are ways in which we’ve tried. One couple working from home charted the number of interruptions from their eight- and twelve-year-old daughters on a random Thursday morning during lockdown. They later published the results in a Washington Post article: “The average length of an uninterrupted stretch of work time was three minutes, 24 seconds. The longest uninterrupted period was 19 minutes, 35 seconds. The shortest was mere seconds.” They counted interruptions as anything intentional: requests for homework help, questions about chores and snacks, check-in hugs, tech support. Distractions, like “cello practice and shrieks of laughter,” weren’t included, but, the couple added, they did take their toll. And as the IFS noted, that toll was felt more often by mothers, who, on average, were only able to do one-third of the paid, uninterrupted work hours of fathers.

  “Mothering right now is an essential service,” York University professor Andrea O’Reilly told me several months into the pandemic. “Mothers are doing this work at a huge cost to their sanity, their leisure, their time, and their careers.” O’Reilly has studied mothering for over three decades and has the c.v. to prove it: she is a professor at York’s School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, was the founder and director of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement from 1997–2020, and also the founder of Demeter Press, which publishes feminist work on mothering, reproduction, sexuality, and family. Which is all to say that while she was frustrated by the ways in which mothers were forgotten, unsupported, and failed during the pandemic, she wasn’t exactly surprised. Like in so many other cases that exposed poor social support, the pandemic only magnified what was already there—a lack of good, affordable child care, a titled division of domestic labour, a seemingly impossible-to-breach wage gap. This is not an equal-opportunity pandemic, O’Reilly thought, watching it all unfold, her own children now adults. Whenever people said women were suffering more, she still liked to correct them. “Mothers are suffering more,” she told people, “because they are the ones doing the care work.”

  O’Reilly felt galvanized to act against this normalization of so-called “women’s work” after she stumbled across a post on Facebook that detailed one single mother’s experience in the Maritimes. The mom described being belittled and bullied at a Costco after being forced to take her young kids with her to get groceries, which was against the store’s recommended rules. She needed supplies, most of her delivery had been cancelled because everything was out of stock, and the only person available to watch her four- and eight-year-old kids was her. She’d arrived at the store on April 2, tears streaming down her face after discovering she’d have to add home-schooling to the mix for who knows how long, only to have employee after employee berate her—as if she’d wanted to bring her kids to the store. It was the first time she’d left her house since the lockdown had begun weeks earlier. After reading the post, O’Reilly created a hashtag and splashed it everywhere she could, making an uncomfortable point: “#MothersAreFrontlineWorkers.” Then she created a Facebook support group for mothers dealing with the pandemic. She wanted them to have a safe space to vent, to feel validated, to find resources; a place where they could say they were not okay and that, sometimes, neither were their kids. Within twenty-four hours, more than 250 moms had joined the group. By
the time I spoke to O’Reilly a few months later, that number sat at 1,200.

  Perhaps what most dismayed her, and many other mothers, was that, outside of their friend groups and Facebook pages, nobody seemed initially inclined to talk about the extra burden put on mothers. Not when governments shut down the economy, and not when they slowly started to reopen it before finding solutions for school and child care. The idea that moms will “take care of it”—whatever “it” may be, whether it’s a scraped knee or a global pandemic—is deeply ingrained into our social psyche. Those in power seemed to assume women would, quite simply, figure it out. Too few were talking about how unsustainable it all was. In O’Reilly’s Facebook group, mothers talked about having to look after kids and also their elderly, sometimes terminally ill, parents; about having to do all the cooking, while others in the family didn’t recognize the energy it took; about being the only one relegated to washing every single fruit and vegetable before it went into the fridge; about falling behind at work; about guilt and children who felt neglected; and about mental and emotional breakdowns and their inevitability. One woman described it thus: “I hadn’t realized marriage instantly meant that one person miraculously loses most of their cognitive functions and the other attains even more miraculous superpowers such as psychically knowing what is needed by every member of the household on two or four legs.” Another said simply: “WTF just happened?”

  Elsewhere, media slowly began to cover the domestic implosion—even if only to ask, as one late April Today’s Parent article did, “Why is nobody talking about how unsustainable this is for working parents?” Some media cautioned of a “patriarchal pandemic” if governments didn’t intercede to offer women more financial support and child care solutions—if, essentially, it didn’t treat them like the essential workers O’Reilly, and eventually others, argued they were. The Atlantic got it right when it stated, early on, “The Coronavirus is a Disaster for Feminism.” Enough with the arrogance and painful positivity, its author stated. Let’s get real. Past pandemics foretold of everything that would come to pass: not only would women take the brunt of home responsibilities and lose out on work, they would feel these repercussions and distortions far into the future as men’s income returned faster to pre-outbreak levels and more women spent more and more time caretaking. “All this looking after—this unpaid caring labor—will fall more heavily on women, because of the existing structure of the workforce,” author Helen Lewis warned. She didn’t exactly need a crystal ball, but for months the crisis buzzed underneath the news cycle, like background noise.

  In June, the New York Times warned again that the “Pandemic Could Scar a Generation of Working Mothers.” By July, it had declared, “In the COVID-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or Job. You Can’t Have Both.” The author, Deb Perelman, also bemoaned the muted alarm. “The consensus is that everyone agrees this is a catastrophe, but we are too bone-tired to raise our voices above a groan, let alone scream through a megaphone,” she wrote. “Every single person confesses burnout, despair, feeling like they are losing their minds, knowing in their guts that this is untenable.” Around that same time, a viral story emerged about one San Diego woman who’d been fired from her job because her boss could hear her young kids in the background on video calls. She decided to sue. For other women, the balance wasn’t only untenable or unfair; it was also dangerous. Across the world, countries began to report rising domestic violence rates. In the U.K., suspected domestic homicides tripled during the first month of lockdown, with sixteen women and girls murdered. In Canada, domestic violence workers noted a surge in both the prevalence and severity of violence. Women reported that their abusers used the isolation of the pandemic to increase control, bending information about both the rules and the virus to limit their ability to seek help. Others legitimately feared increased contact at a shelter. Plans to leave abusive situations were abruptly curtailed. Many shelters found themselves in urgent need of new volunteers. “When COVID-19 hit back in March we scaled up our crisis line to be 24/7,” said Angela Marie MacDougall, executive director of B.C.-based Battered Women’s Support Services, at the end of August. “Since then, calls to our crisis line have increased by up to 300 per cent.” She needed another twenty new volunteers to keep up with all the calls. For far too many women, nowhere felt comfortable. Nowhere felt safe.

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  For many pregnant mothers, the hospital seemed like the scariest place of all. Tali Bogler is a physician and the chair of family medicine obstetrics at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. In March, her twin daughters were not quite three years old; she didn’t have to reach back to remember her own pregnancy anxiety. And that was in normal times. When the pandemic was declared, it felt to Bogler like a huge, invisible switch had flipped. Even though she hadn’t closed her practice, her phone began ringing cancellation after cancellation. Pregnant women left her office with tears pelting down their faces. Others phoned ahead to ask if they should come into their appointment, shocked and unsure of what to do. Every common worry had ballooned in size, and then burst. Bogler understood their pop! pop! pop! of fear. Her first thought when the WHO declared the pandemic was, How am I going to support women during this time?

  But she, like everyone else, had few answers about how hazardous the virus was to pregnant people. Her mind went to the Zika virus, which the WHO named a global health emergency in 2016. At the time, the health agency warned pregnant women, or those who might become pregnant, not to travel to nearly one hundred countries and regions. If a child-bearing person became infected, the virus could damage the fetal nervous system, even if said person didn’t develop symptoms. If that damage did occur, the baby could develop congenital Zika syndrome, which has five key markers, including brain damage. The Canadian federal government had lifted travel warnings related to Zika only a few months earlier. Initially, Bogler had no way of knowing if COVID-19 would pose a similar threat or become something even worse. Viruses in general tended to attack the immunocompromised, and both pregnant people and newborns fit into that category. (It’s worth noting that, six months into the pandemic, information on how the virus affects pregnant people and newborns remained distressingly deficient; some early data has shown that pregnant people are more at risk and are 70 per cent more likely to need respirators if they do get the virus, but a Grand Canyon of questions has persisted.)

  Even if the new coronavirus spared them, Bogler knew that the mass shutdown of services would affect her patients in other, detrimental ways. “It was such a shock for pregnant women, because you do everything you can to have a healthy pregnancy,” she said. You eat the right foods, sign up for the right classes, avoid all the risks. “And then this was something completely out of control for them.” Women who had the resources for prenatal classes were abruptly left with nothing. Grandparents who had intended to be present for the baby’s birth or to provide support in the postpartum period were forced to stay home. Community supports were nullified. Women who were already facing higher risks only saw them skyrocket. Add to all that the absolute paralyzing fear of not knowing if your newborn could catch COVID-19, or what it would do to them if they did. And add to that the destabilizing uncertainty of bringing a new life into a world throttled by a pandemic. A world that nobody thought would ever be the same again. There was no “ultimate guide” for that.

  Within days of receiving the lockdown orders, Bogler and other providers she worked with began to brainstorm new ways they could reassure—and reach—their patients. They landed on a simple, but highly effective, solution: Instagram. Not only was it free and easily accessible, but they knew that many pregnant people fit into the platform’s demographic. In early April, they launched an account under the name Pandemic Pregnancy Guide, and gave the page a cheeky description: “What to expect when you’re expecting…during a pandemic.” The colour scheme is a checkerboard of Insta-calm, all rich teal and blush pink. The tone of each post exhibits the s
ame calm; captions are evidence-based, competent, clear. Early posts talked about whether patients in labour were wearing masks; how prenatal care might change; the likelihood of hospitals reducing the “one support person” rule to zero, a controversial and panic-producing move that would force people to give birth alone. Comments were both anxious and thankful, vacillating between posters who expressed general alarm and those who, in typical Insta fashion, thanked organizers, left heart emojis, and said things like “bless.”

  Bogler and the other founders expected their followers would include their immediate patients, and maybe their friends. Instead, the page quickly gained more than ten thousand followers. As their numbers and profile grew, the team started to receive sponsorship offers. Bogler turned them all down. It was important for her that the information remain free from influence and bias; the information is strictly medical and that’s it. By September 2020, the page had hosted dozens of live expert sessions, on everything from optimal birth positions to going to the ER during the initial outbreak surge. As the country began to reopen schools, the account also addressed the extra anxieties of families with school-aged kids. They hosted a Pride-themed prenatal and postpartum workout, and they discussed intimate partner violence. They talked about Black maternal health, diversified their experts, and even tackled post-pregnancy sex. In a time particularly rife with social media and “I heard that…” misinformation, Bogler and her colleagues worked hard to quell uncertainty and provide good information. They listened to feedback about the platform and got better at all the tech stuff and savvy branding. “None of us are influencers on Instagram,” said Bogler. “We’re all learning things as we go.”