A love note to the Covid-era mothers...

When lockdown began my daughter was just turning 3 months old. I had seen a handful of clients in person and I was struggling with leaving my baby with a babysitter. So when we were told to stay home I was flooded with relief. With the privilege afforded to me in so many ways, I was able to take walks, work through the trials of breastfeeding that were harder than I could have ever imagined, and be with my baby, holding her as she napped for hours at a time.

This moment of reprieve as a new mother was needed, but brief. I now see this period as the calm before the slow-forming storm. Months later I would look back and weep at my naïveté. I would say to myself, You just didn’t know what was coming…And weep some more.

When the months got dark and lockdowns persisted, mothering changed. It was not soothing. The isolation permeated every cell and piece of me. It suffocated and dried me out utterly.

My therapist at the time of Covid beginning would say to me regarding my mothering experience, which we had prepared for months together, “This wasn’t the experience you imagined.” This would smack with a sense of deep misattunement, but really it was a lack of true understanding. No, this wasn’t the experience I expected, but it was more than that…. This was trauma that no one expected. I came to feel that my only trustworthy people were mothers who mothered little ones during Covid. Especially new mothers like myself became a healing balm of resonance and commiseration.

When I talk frankly and openly about the trauma of mothering during Covid, I am often met with surprised relief from other mothers that someone is daring to name the overstimulation and boredom of mothering during a pandemic.

Mothers are finding me these days for therapy, by really no effort of my own. I trust in this kind of psychic resonance that pulls us to people with wounds similar to our own, hopefully with medicine grown from those wounds.

Now, as I sit with mothers of the Covid-era, I feel forged in the fire of these times. Jung viewed vocational calling as something we do not have conscious control over—our callings are from soul and the collective. We are called based on soul curriculums and the need of the times. I never planned to be a therapist for mothers, but somehow that is what has happened. In particular, mothers of the Covid-era who have endured the trials of a pandemic and social unrest and ecological collapse.

If you are interested in connecting, receiving support, digesting your mothering experience, I'm here.

Please reach out.

Warmly,

Kathryn