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About The Bulletin. (Bend, OR) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (May 9, 2021)
A4 The BulleTin • Sunday, May 9, 2021 Mothers Continued from A1 A year ago, as the pandemic seemed to grow unchecked, The Bulletin spoke with nearly a dozen mothers about their experiences with pregnancy. A year later, The Bulletin fol- lowed up with three of those mothers, who are now cele- brating their second Mother’s Day in a pandemic. Parenting in a pandemic, they say, meant struggling with isolation. It meant having to say “no” to their children more often to things that should be “yeses,” and sometimes not feeling like they were parenting the best they could. It meant learning to get cre- ative, and doing things they may have not had time for be- fore the pandemic. Most of all, the pandemic meant these mothers had extra time with their newborns — time that usually would not be afforded to them if things were normal. “I think a lot of people feel the way I do,” Kite said. “I don’t think I’m unique in feeling this (pandemic) recalibrated what’s important.” Since April of last year, more than 2,000 babies have been born at St. Charles Bend, ac- cording to Kristina Menard, the director of Women and Children’s Services for St. Charles Health System. De- spite national reports of birth rates declining, the hospital has not seen a significant increase or decrease in the number of births in Central Oregon, Menard said in an email. The hospital has seen an in- crease in planned home births since the beginning of the pan- demic, however. “We do not have any data to explain the increase, but it does correlate with the start of the pandemic and is likely related,” Menard wrote in an email. Madeline Drescher was one of the mothers who gave birth at home, to her daughter Mae in late May. The pandemic put stress on both her personal and profes- sional life. At the beginning of the pandemic, Drescher worked as a Doula — a person Ryan Brennecke/Bulletin photos Leslie Neugebauer and her daughter Lyla, 1, laugh while playing in their backyard. who is trained to offer emo- tional and physical support to women going through child- birth. But after local hospitals re- stricted the number of peo- ple who could be in a hospital room to one, Drescher’s busi- ness suffered. Mothers were forced to choose between their spouse and their doula, and of- ten chose the spouse. She has mixed feelings about having to shut down her busi- ness. “I’m relieved that I get to spend more time with my fam- ily and not be on call for the first time in six years, but also very sad because it’s a huge part of me and what I love to do,” Drescher said. With four kids at home, the 34-year-old Bend resident faced new challenges in par- enting that she hadn’t before in raising her older children. She felt bad for constantly having to say no to what otherwise would be reasonable requests to go to the park or the library. Instead of taking all of her Erica Kite picks flowers with her family at their La Pine home. children to the store — some- thing she used to enjoy before the pandemic — she had to learn how to either go alone or with just a couple of her chil- dren, fearing how she would be perceived bringing more peo- ple into a store than was rec- ommended in a pandemic. She still worries about how the isolation and lack of social contact will affect the develop- ment of her younger children. “So much about how we interact as an adult we learn when we are kids,” she said. The pandemic did encour- age both Drescher and her children to be more creative. With traditional entertainment avenues shut down for much of the pandemic, Drescher and her family were forced to ask: What can we do at home for fun? More books were read at home. More time was spent playing with children and get- ting their hands dirty in the backyard. Her older children set up small neighborhood stands to sell geodes they found, or plant starts they had grown in the garden. “It just reminds me there is still beauty in the world,” Dre- scher said. “It’s really easy to focus on the doom and gloom, but my kids are over here look- ing at frogs and worms and it reminds you there is still a beautiful world going on.” For Leslie Neugebauer, rais- ing a newborn in the pandemic felt like every decision she made had higher stakes than decisions she had previously made. “When you are a parent, you question every decision you make,” Neugebauer said. “Now it’s even more so.” Neugebauer, a 40-year-old Bend resident, was faced with questions about whether it was safe to send her older child to preschool, or her newborn to daycare. She too, fears how a lack of socialization will affect her baby, Lyla, who just recently turned 1. . Lyla has rarely got- ten sick — an uncommon phenomenon in normal times — and Neugebauer fears what that will mean for her immune system down the line. “She’s only met a fraction of the people the older kid has met,” Neugebauer said. “What’s going to happen in, two, three, four years for kids who have never been sick? That’s a con- sequence I never thought of.” And having a baby during a government shutdown and stay-at-home orders meant get- ting little to no support to help take care of her older son in the weeks following Lyla’s birth. “He watched more TV in Continued on next page