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
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