Bushfires, coronavirus… and a newborn. Living through 2020 as a new mum

2020 has been no ordinary year. Still reeling from the destruction of the bushfires Australians are now having to adjust to also dealing with a global pandemic. In today’s blog post Dr Laura Davy gives her personal reflections on what it has been like to live through these unprecedented times at the same time as becoming a mother for the first time.

First there was fire, floods and ice, and then there was panic and pestilence...

It reads like something out of the Old Testament, but these have been the realities of the last few months, the months during which I also became a mother for the first time.

In the 3 months since my daughter Freyja was born into a hot and smoky December in our nation’s capital, the ACT government has declared 2 states of emergency: the first in January in light of dangerous fire and weather conditions, and the most recent last week over the coronavirus pandemic. The last time a state of emergency had been instated was in 2003, 17 years ago.

Photo: Baby Freyja, blissfully unaware of bushfires, climate change and coronovirus

Immersed in the world of caring for a newborn, I managed to avoid the wider existential angst about climate change that this horror bushfire season brought to many around me. Being around a newborn means being pulled into the now at every moment. The immediacy of learning settling techniques and breastfeeding holds on very little sleep leaves little time for reflecting on the path we’re headed down as a species.

However, there was no avoiding the immediate crisis, even in Canberra which remained largely untouched by actual flame. My mother was stuck for hours on the Hume Highway because of a grassfire that struck one day when she was driving down to visit her new granddaughter. My sister was evacuated from her new apartment in the Blue Mountains when the Grose Valley fire spread out of control, her dedicated disability support workers working overtime to drive their clients to safety. Smoke haze from fires to the north, east and south hemmed in the city and penned us indoors for weeks on end. It first rolled in, appearing thick in the streets like a gloomy dark magic one Saturday night a week before my baby was born.

When Freyja was 4 days old, she was readmitted to hospital overnight for phototherapy treatment for newborn jaundice. As my husband and I walked through the special care nursery with our baby in my arms the smell of smoke had infiltrated the corridors. Out the windows was a sky of burnt orange and great rolling clouds of smoke smothering the horizon. I was crying. “You’ve always been the strong one I suppose”, one of the nurses commented to my husband.

The smoke rolled in thick again the night before New Year’s Eve, but this time it permeated every corner of our old-style rental home, creeping in through cracks in the windows and door frames. We packed up our baby bath, blankets and change mat and stayed in serviced apartments with reverse cycle air conditioning for the next few nights. We were lucky – not all families could afford to do this. We didn’t return home until we could fumigate the house and set up a small air purifier next to the baby’s bassinet.

In February came a period of relative peace. Heatwaves, flooding and hail storms occurred only at the edge of our awareness as we focused on getting to know our new baby. My husband returned to work. We started to get the hang of things. I got confident enough to take my baby out to the park, then to cafes, then to the baby-friendly movie screenings at my local cinema. We never quite forgot how good it was to breathe clean air or to venture outside without checking air quality monitoring websites.

But it felt like only weeks of this care-free existence before oppression set in again. The coronavirus epidemic became headline news. The outdoors was once again full of threat. Invisible contagions were amongst us, living for days on everyday surfaces and forcing us to distance ourselves from each other. Baby wipes, like toilet paper, were sold out at the supermarket.

At moments during the madness of the last months I wondered what kind of world I have brought my daughter into. Will smoke and hand sanitiser be the smells of her childhood? How long will our new lexicon – ‘beyond hazardous air quality’, ‘particulate count’, ‘self-isolation’, ‘social distancing’ – last?

Mothers have anguished in similar ways for countless generations. Bringing a child into the world is an experience intrinsically associated with both precarity – an anxiety about the innate potential for loss – and hope.

I may well be raising my daughter in a time during which our ways of being in the world are profoundly changing. Experts forecast a ‘new normal’ of smoky, devastating summers. People are increasingly connecting for work and recreation online rather than in person to avoid contagion. Juggling the public life of work with the private work of caring for family members is becoming both more visible and more widespread as people are required to work from home. But will all of this jump start our sense of responsibility to each other and the planet? Or only increase polarisation and mutual isolation?

There will likely be another pandemic after this one, but it will emerge gradually and it will be a long time before we understand its full extent. Months of anxiety, compounded by increasing social isolation, will take its toll on our nation’s mental health. From a personal point of view, social isolation is a major driver of postnatal depression amongst mothers after the birth of their child.[1] I worry about keeping my baby and myself stimulated with all the baby friendly events cancelled and cafes and other public spaces closed.

For now, we are going on lots of walks in the autumn sunshine. Last Monday, the day the ACT government declared its second state of emergency this year, I sent my mother a photo of us adventuring out for the morning, Freyja happily strapped into the baby carrier at my chest. “She’ll be a warrior child of the apocalypse!” my mother texted me back, “strong and fierce”.

I only hope she won’t have to be.

Dr Laura Davy is a Research Fellow in the Equity and Diversity stream at the Public Service Research Group, UNSW Canberra. A political theorist and sociologist, her research focuses on disability and care theory and policy. Her current research analyses the range of influences shaping disability policy in Australia and internationally, such as the implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the shift towards market-based social services delivery.

[1] https://www.panda.org.au/info-support/after-birth/contributing-factors-for-postnatal-depression-or-anxiety

Moderator: Celia Green