How We Became a Family

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

We were three new parents. My daughter was born in the first pandemic spring, in a city shut down and scared and silent.

When it had come time to make a decision and hand over a deposit for the caterer, I had cancelled my baby shower instead and let my closest friends from the East Coast know that they shouldn’t come after all. My father, an economist, always admonished me to apply a careful cost/benefit analysis to every important decision, and any sadness I felt at missing out on this rite of passage—a big celebration in my home with all my favorite people—was utterly outweighed by the potential cataclysmic disaster of hosting a super-spreader event.

“Super-spreader” is a word that suddenly entered all of our vocabularies, that spring in 2020, when we were all consumed with worry about contracting the novel coronavirus. We didn’t know how it might affect a baby in utero or a newborn and we weren’t about to find out.

So, there was no baby shower, and there were no grandparents, no visitors in the hospital, no friends dropping by with casseroles. Just us.

Spending hours together in our apartment with the view of the city, marking hours and days by the colors of the brightening sky, the evening blanket of thick fog spilling down from Twin Peaks, and the position of the moon. We didn’t go out for weeks, and then, only for walks around the neighborhood with the stroller, carefully distant from any neighbor.

So many new mothers talk of the sleep deprivation and exhaustion, and these things I did experience, yet I hardly remember that part. Foremost in my mind, I see the gentle ebb and flow of loving:

My boyfriend drove the car, drove us to the hospital and picked us up, made sure the house was spotlessly clean and ready for us to return with our new little person. My husband would get up in the middle of the night, changing diapers and bringing her to me in bed to nurse and then tucking her back into her bassinet, all so I could get the maximum possible amount of sleep. I held her, breastfed, bled, cried. Both of them traded off with me, holding her so carefully in their big arms and bouncing endlessly on a yoga ball, the one thing that always soothed her when she fussed. Both of them made every meal and did every chore to give me hours per day for holding, nursing, resting, and healing. Both of them sang more than I’d ever heard either of them sing, anything to make her smile.

Before our daughter arrived, I might have simply described our relationship as a V: a triad with myself as a hinge between two partners. Our newborn year, as I affectionately call it, hammered us into a deeper form of relating, and loving. Our daughter doesn’t remember that spring, but we do. It’s how we became a family.

Originally published in the collection, 13 Shorts to Celebrate Queer Love, The Queer Love Project.