text: Across the country in Vancouver, Nusha Balram was also learning as she went. On March 1, 2020, she had officially gone on maternity leave from her job at a trade union, where she works in human rights and equity training. About a month before that, a pregnant Balram, her nine-year-old son, her mother, and her partner had moved out of the 65-square-metre attic apartment they all shared and into a space with a backyard big enough to build a tree house. "Oh my God," they all joked, "look, we're all hanging out in the same room and we're not even touching!" It was perfect. And then, just a few weeks later on March 13, the city went into lockdown. Within days, she realized how bad everything might get—how different it would all be—when she looked at her bank account. Everything was refunded: her mom-and-baby yoga classes, all their upcoming community centre programs, the summer YMCA camp for her son. She had three thousand dollars of cancelled spring and summer plans sitting there in dollar signs and zeros. Then, her midwife team announced they were switching to phone-only appointments. Before then, she'd visited the duo every two weeks, sometimes every week. They were friends with her and her partner. Suddenly, she couldn't see them at all.
  
  "I felt a little lost," said Balram. It was hard for her to figure out her next best steps because every day felt like a different reality. The case numbers kept changing, and with them the recommendations for what to do, how to keep safe. Every single day, Balram stayed glued to her TV, waiting for Dr. Bonnie Henry's daily announcement, a small compass in the chaos: "Everybody knows Dr. Henry is the best." Some days, it felt like the stay-at-home order was just issued yesterday; other days it felt like they'd been self-quarantining for years. Every day was the same, and every day was built on a foundation of anxiety. Balram was exhausted, very pregnant, and hadn't yet decided where she would give birth. Before the lockdown, she and her partner had been negotiating whether to go to the hospital or stay home. Her partner, who is Indigenous, felt strongly about a home birth; he'd wanted to honour traditional practices, such as smudging and drumming. Balram was more on the fence. She'd given birth to her son, who has a different father, at the B.C. Women's Hospital, and remembered the experience as "wonderful." And as COVID-19 descended on her city, she began to feel guilty about asking her doula and midwife team to forgo the safety of the hospital.
  
  Balram had plenty of time to think about it during her near week of non-progressive contractions. With nowhere to go, she'd sit on her roof deck all day, watching the sluggish tempo of the new world below. And then, in the middle of the night, after everyone agreed to try a home birth, she finally went into labour. Her doula arrived at the house at 5 a.m., dressed in full PPE. The midwife team arrived shortly after that, also in full safety armor. Balram hardly noticed what they were wearing at all. It was an excruciating, difficult, lovely birth. Balram was one of the roughly 25 per cent of women to experience back labour, which is exceptionally gruelling and is usually caused when the baby is facing the stomach instead of the spine. There wasn't much she could do at home to ease the agony besides get in the bath, which she didn't want to do. Without an epidural, or other hospital-only treatments, she needed her big support team to get her through the pain; they all had a job, or three. A kind word. Encouragement. Back massage. Water. Distraction. Helping her to switch positions. At last, at about 8 a.m., her daughter was born. It was April 20, "which will probably be annoying for me when she's a teenager," joked Balram. Somebody took a cute picture of the midwives in full PPE, giving little peace signs. Under the mask, goggles, and cap, you can't see their smiling faces at all.
  
  The next day, over Facetime from Saskatchewan, her partner's parents sang the warrior song to their new grandchild. It was meant to help her be strong. It was also meant to be sung as soon as the baby was born, the first words she heard. But COVID-19 had forced the excited to-be grandparents to cancel their initial plans to fly out for the birth. It was still a sweet moment, but it wasn't the same. There were a lot of things that weren't the same. When Balram was pregnant with her son, she worked at a settlement agency, often organizing multicultural pot luck lunches for the forty or so diverse seniors under her care. After she gave birth, she brought her son out to one of those lunches, where he was passed around, cuddled and kissed, tickled and held. It was, as Balram put it, "basically like having forty grandmas and grandpas." This time, there was no bubbling joy that accompanied introducing her new child to loved ones, friends, acquaintances. Her girlfriends couldn't drop by her new place to marvel over her daughter's tiny curled fists, her soft skin and precious face. Even when it became safe to meet for a socially distanced lunch outside, nobody could hold her daughter but her. When her daughter cried, or if Balram just needed a break, she just had to keep on holding her. It was weird and sad and more than a little heartbreaking.
  
  "It's been this constant swing of emotion," said Balram. "The theme of this entire time is feeling a lot of loss, but also feeling a lot of privilege." Even in the darkness, she had much to cherish. Her daughter was healthy and safe, and so too were the rest of her family. Co-parenting her son wasn't easy even before the pandemic, but she felt grateful his father took the outbreak as seriously as she did. Honestly, thinking about her past relationship with her ex, she felt grateful she wasn't isolating in the house with him, stuck in something that didn't work. She felt really grateful that she'd been able to move before the lockdown and was no longer in the tiny, impossible space where she knew she'd have figuratively killed somebody, probably even before self-isolation. As it turned out, her partner and her kid did build a treehouse in the new backyard, and it was beautiful. Her son learned to cook. She felt privileged to have her mat leave, to be able to spend so much time with her family. She was even thankful she got to be there for the tough stuff, like taking her son to the city's Juneteenth protests at the height of that spring's Black Lives Matter activism. They talked about what it meant to be people of colour, what it meant to be Indigenous, what it meant to be Black. They talked about colonialism and racism and injustice.
  
  But perhaps the best moment of all came in July when her partner's parents, having had no cases at all in the town where they live, decided it was safe to make the trek to visit their son and his family. When they arrived, they sang the warrior song in person, and they held their granddaughter—the first new people outside of her own household and the midwives to do so since she was born, nearly three months before.