Home: Narratives of Confinement

A letter-writing project exploring experiences of home during COVID-19

Women have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Mothers in the Montreal region were invited to participate in sharing their experiences of working, parenting, and living in confinement as a part of a pilot project gathering qualitative data on gender inequality and COVID-19 in Canada. The project was funded by the SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation at Concordia University, from 2020-2021.

Home: Narratives of Confinement is a series of letters written on the experiences of staying home during the COVID-19 lockdown. Volunteers were invited to write a letter to an anonymous recipient (e.g. a partner, a parent, an employer, or a friend).

Excerpts of letters documenting our findings are presented below, accompanied by photographs that captured an aspect of the experience. This virtual "installation" is held in lieu of an in-person gathering, given COVID-19 restrictions. The key themes that emerged from the letters are being compiled for a report.

In addition, we present an interview with V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) on the concept of 'disaster patriarchy.' This engages with her global project on gender inequality during the pandemic.

We welcome your feedback at info@familycarecollective.org

“Don’t get me wrong, we are quite lucky. We have no financial stress, and I have been able to extend my maternity leave without pay without worrying about losing my job. I am very aware that we are extremely lucky. However, we are living in a small open concept loft with a baby, we have no walls and nowhere to go to escape or even rest (besides the closet, which does get used for that purpose at times). 

Our son was three months old when the lockdown started. My husband started working from home, and we decided as a team that I would do any activities out of the house because he has juvenile diabetes, and is therefore at higher risk. It was a lot of pressure. I resented it and still do resent it often. Some days I mourn the maternity leave that I didn’t have. I wanted to go to mom and baby yoga, and music class, and meet friends for coffee. I miss doing that. It is almost impossible to book a zoom call or facetime with new moms, so I have given up trying. I miss having somewhere to go during the day. I need the interaction, the normalizing.”

“I had been up with the twins all night. They both finally fell asleep in the morning just as Bertie woke up, wanting to spend time with us. Some days, I could never manoeuvre any overlap in all three sleep schedules.”

 

“Working from home during the pandemic often required a lot more screen time than I'm normally comfortable with. I had to remind myself to take it easy on myself (and them) while we got used to almost constant contact under the same work pressures as before.”

“Sometimes I didn't feel like getting out of bed. Everyone was isolated, everything was closed, and my only interaction in the day was with a 6 month old. Yet, thankfully she was there. Everyday, unmasked - Her smiles and coos brought me so much happiness.”

Disaster Patriarchy and COVID-19: an Interview with V (Eve Ensler)

The interview with V, formerly known as Eve Ensler and best known for her play The Vagina Monologues, was organized after she had completed a global project, working with activists and grassroots leaders from India to Italy, to understand how women had been impacted by the conditions of lockdown during COVID-19. We set out to discuss with her the notion of disaster patriarchy, a term she used, building on Naomi Klein's 'disaster capitalism' and Rachel Luft's 'racialized disaster patriarchy', to describe how women across the world have been disproportionately impacted by violence, lack of safety, loss of education and major setbacks to their career during the pandemic. Click on the link to hear the interview. To see the essay written by V for The Guardian here on similar issues, click below.

 

Special thanks to Nancy Ferranti for editing this video.

Dear Son,

It took a lot for me to get to this place. I fought for it. I fought for me. I fought for us. Work was the casualty. After spending this past year grinding away, I’ve finally let go. I accept that I can’t do it all. I can’t be the mom I want to be and at the same time perform to the level that I know I can professionally. Trying to do it all left me completely burnt out and feeling hopeless.

This past year, nothing could take me away from the demands of work. Not you, not your brother, not my marriage and certainly not my own needs. I was obsessed. I couldn’t stop ruminating about work. Even when I was with you, my mind was somewhere else. That’s where my focus was and where I put my best energy. I deeply regret it. What I left for you were the scraps of me and I did not live up to the standards of what I think a loving and nurturing mother is. I was so busy taking care of the business and my team members that I didn’t leave the space to honor the relationships that mean the most to me and I thought that I could somehow survive in a constant state of overdrive and digging deeper and deeper and deeper until there was nothing left.

I tried to appreciate the little moments. My expectations of what I was capable of and what was required of me was impossible. I was not only back at work full time with a baby but putting in extra hours at work, cleaning the house for our help, carting your brother around for outdoor play dates, breastfeeding and trying to make this all feel like vacation. And this on no sleep. It was impossible. I was miserable. I started thinking about killing myself. I had an image of a noose around my neck that I thought about often. 

There were so many times when I couldn’t take being at home anymore. I needed to leave but I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t take the noise. I couldn’t hear myself think. Your brother wanted mommy all the time. I could hear you crying but worked through it. A low point was when our babysitter told me that I ignore you. It was really hard to hear.

I felt like a pressure cooker ready to explode. One morning, I was feeling such immense stress and pressure that I bit my wrist really hard. I still feel the nerve damage months later. I had never engaged in self harm before. It really scared me. I felt so completely hopeless. I couldn’t continue this anymore, but I didn’t know a way out.

In December things changed. My body physically wouldn’t allow me to continue. It was shutting down. I was completely burnt out. I was depleted. I stopped breastfeeding you. It was too taxing on my body. I wasn’t sleeping and I wasn’t eating. I had been suffering from daily headaches for months. There were times when I was sure I would have a heart attack from the chronic high levels of stress. I was experiencing episodes of blurred vision. I was having difficulty concentrating. My mood was terrible. I was so angry all the time. I was resentful to be working so hard and not having a maternity leave. I  couldn’t survive in this chronic state of panic and stress and fear. I knew that if I continued like this, there would be long-term health implications.

I was done. I took a week off to finally take care of myself. I went back to the basics – prioritized sleep and nourished my body with healthy foods. The next week I focused on you guys – you, your brother and your father and you recharged my soul. I came back from this break with the beginnings of a different outlook on life.

“Our son needed eye surgery and the pandemic delayed everything. We were not allowed to accompany him to general anaesthesia. He was so afraid when we were asked to walk away from him and wait outside. 2 hours felt like a lifetime in mommy-time.”

 

The burden of remembering.

In November 2019 I was set to start work again after my mat leave.  I was nervous, worried, scared and most of all unsure of how I was going to deal with not seeing my little girl all day. She still wasn’t sleeping through the night, she was still nursing on demand and couldn’t comprehend how I would be a functional employee on zero sleep.

Alas, November 2019 came and I went back to work. I got back into some sort of “groove”. The mornings of course were hectic, with nursing, breakfast, and packing her lunch, getting myself presentable… then the timer started after 2 pm for me at work counting down the minutes until I got to go home and see her and start my second shift.

Come March 2020, I was about 4 months in my new routine and on the 3rd was set to fly to NYC. I didn’t pack a pump. It was hell. My daughter was dealing with her first real virus and I came back from NYC sick as a dog. Come to think of it- it was a week before the world shut down and NYC was the epicentre of COVID; so odds are I had it.

Although the physical and emotional demands have been hard,  the heaviest burden is the remembering. Remembering to buy the groceries we need for the week, meal plan,  cook healthy meals, clean the house, laundry, insane pressures and deadlines at work, etc. This mental burden of literally trying to keep a checklist that never ends continuously is debilitating. I discussed it with my husband many times… ”can you do the dishes?” “yes” he says I will get around to it. Cut to dinner time when I need those pots and pans clean and they aren’t done… so I do it.

Enter the  burden of scheduling. Managing the complexities of life and my home is unmanageable. I am living a groundhog day of completing tasks that never end.  This isn’t a new issue, or a pandemic issue; I am assured that this has been around for hundreds of years. Women are more perhaps able to handle and socialized to think about kids, family, home, etc. Although that narrative really irks me when the expectations of a career aren’t adjusted accordingly.

The first wave; the world shuts down. 2 weeks to flatten the curve. On some level, although I am worried and unsure how we will manage; I felt guilty. People were dying. My husband lost his job. Life was far from stressful. Then I realized; daycare closed… daycare closed and I had my baby back. My baby on my own terms. Not rushed and stressed upon drop-off and pick-up.

I still worked. I am actually working more than I have in a decade, we laid off some people and I was doing the job of 3. I worked 50-60 hours a week. But I was home. My husband was home. My baby was home. I oddly felt a sense of safety. Did my tasks teach a lesson? No. In fact there was actually more on my plate with no childcare other than myself and my husband who was spending the entire day trying to find employment.

The dynamic remained status quo. Everything that was on my plate, continued to be. I have become robotic. Robotic in my own daily life. Ensuring every single person's needs are met and exceeded and depleting myself daily. The burden of remembering and scheduling is harder at times than the actual tasks. I stopped trying to understand, and I stopped asking for help.

What have I realized? I realized that it’s just not fair and honestly I don’t have hope that it will ever be fair for women. Although I suppose fairness is arbitrary, but, perhaps a better word is balanced. The expectations are so high at times that we are almost set up to fail. The weight of the house, the career, the burden of remembering and the stress of managing. And you know what would help the most?  It’s not even the help. What would help the most is appreciation. Appreciation for all that I do behind the scenes. A “thank you”. An acknowledgement. A simple “I notice that”.

 
 
 
 

“This is typically how I could be found at any hour of the daytime - tandem feeding with the toddler hovering. Bertie was still breastfeeding once a day at 2-and-a-half; I weaned him when I was 7 months pregnant with the twins. I was inspired while at the pharmacy answering the standard questions: "pregnant? breastfeeding?" and I had to utter aloud "I'm breastfeeding and pregnant with twins" - I suddenly realized that was a lot. Although Bertie hadn't asked for breastfeeding until he saw the twins do it, when he saw me tandem feed the first fews times, he said "I guess there's no room for me?" and broke my heart.”

“This period has made me see the limits (that have always been there) with utter clarity. the ceilings, the brick walls, the sense of impossibility... there is no way I can perform like you, like him, or even to my ability. i see myself fall short, and be seen as falling short every day, and though you all have the rhetoric of understanding, the boxes to fill in on forms about how Covid has impacted productivity, and the polite smiles that preface the Zoom meetings, you continue to have expectations that I can't fulfil. The panic about it makes me feel alone and at sea, and worst of all, I'm an impatient parent, because I don't know where to release all this anxiety. so it's lose-lose, all round lose. I feel hopeless about the future of my work, that I spent a lifetime building with all my energy.”

 

Dear daughters,

When you’re able to read this, hopefully Covid-19 will be a distant memory for all of us. We, as a family, were not among the most affected during the pandemic. We kept our jobs and had each other’s support and company to go through it. We also had the opportunity to decelerate and be home, spending quality time together and taking care of our living space. But there were hard moments. Moments I will never forget and that made me and your dad test our limits. So, while Covid is still part of our reality—it has already been a year—I want to tell you how it hit me when it first came upon us.

The day of my 34th birthday, COVID was still not a big problem in Canada, but that would change very soon. That Tuesday—the same day that Italy declared a state of emergency—we had my birthday dinner party with more than 20 friends at a restaurant nearby. The following Friday, Quebec announced it would be closing daycares, schools and all non-essential businesses for two weeks. It became three months.

Only the idea of having to take care of my daughter—a few months under two years old—while meeting the increasing demands of a manager position at a big company, made me nervous. Your dad was starting a new job where he was asked to go to the office twice a week, even though he could perfectly work from home 100% of the time. That meant being two days by myself working as a product manager and as caregiver, full-time, at the same time. The days your dad was here, we took turns taking care of our toddler, but the time it was my turn to work was simply not enough. I had to try catching up with work after putting her to bed, around 9:30pm.

I hoped for the workload to decrease even just a bit, as a result of a global pandemic that put many people in the same situation we were in, working with kids. But it didn’t. It seemed that somehow people were managing to work, work, work, send emails, schedule meetings and deliver everything on time, while I was spending all day struggling juggling work and taking care of my daughter. I felt I was doing a terrible job at both.

I was participating in interminable, uptight, corporate virtual meetings at least once a day. Many times, I had to present hoping my daughter wouldn’t scream in the middle of my presentation, or I wouldn’t lose my train of thought, or miss anything being asked to me while I was on mute telling my daughter to not play with that wire. At the same time, I felt terrible guilt for not paying as much attention as I normally would pay to her, not doing fun and stimulating activities, or even just playing with her most of the day. There was no time to cook, or do chores, or declutter a place that served as a home, an office for two people and a play area for a toddler. Everywhere you looked there was a mess. It was very stressful.

We found out I was pregnant just a couple of weeks into the pandemic. We were very happy about having a new baby and didn’t even question whether the timing was appropriate, but the nausea, tiredness and hormones kicked in not long after, making me feel miserable. I cried many times and wondered how I could possibly carry on with this weight. I was worried that my stress would somehow affect the baby that was growing inside me. I thought maybe I should go on anticipated mat leave, or some sort of sick leave to prevent burnout, or maybe even quit my job. Many women in the US were actually quitting their jobs. And many people in the world were losing their jobs and struggling financially. We weren’t. We were lucky enough to have a stable source of income, so we should be grateful, we shouldn’t complain…

I hope when you read this you don’t feel that you were a burden during that time.

 

  • “The photo with James was taken as he was actually on a work call, but was trying to give me an hour off. Bertie was only 2 years old still. That was the reality of working from home when the daycare was closed in the first wave. As you know, the twins were born one month before the first lockdown, when Bertie's daycare also closed for almost two months.”

  • “The day goes in waves. The house is a pressure cooker by midday, no one can visit us, and we can't go anywhere. I want to explode, the kids are running up the walls. I try a session of high intensity exercise but they are on top of me. I give up, accept the situation. That nothing, NOTHING that "counts'' can get done. I accept it, take them into one of the first spring sunbeams, make a snack, build a fort, and look at how strong and content they can be in this small moment of ours, in our tiny cocoon, within a huge seawave of global chaos.”

  • “I educate. I teach about advocacy and agency, and then on the day, I wait. For a text. For a call. We speak, I remind you of your choices, you make decisions. I wait again. I hope from the other side of our communications that you are being respected, well-treated. Bits and pieces here and there. And then a photo of you holding your baby. What a triumph. I sit on my hands, I let the tears fall. I feel relieved, and also sad. But we made it through.”

Dear grandfather,

You must be wondering how different things are right now. It’s a world I never imagined living in, that’s for sure. I pictured my maternity leave many times, and in my head it was full of visits, brunches, my mom spending the week or weeks after birth with us. Of course, this is not how it happened. My son, Javier, your great-grandson, has yet to see his relatives without masks, and has met most people only outdoors.

Your favourite thing was always family gatherings, and family meals. This year was a year void of those. My son’s first Thanksgiving and Christmas were spent with just his mom and dad. Of course, he didn’t know the difference, and it was actually a peaceful and simple celebration that we enjoyed, but knowing that my grandmothers were spending the holidays alone made me sad.

Can I be honest for a second? Despite how lucky I know I am, I have shed tears for the maternity leave I didn’t have. Javier will be 6 months old next week, and we have never gone to any “mom and baby” activities.We have never been to story time at the library, and he has never been babysat by his grandparents. When I go back to school and work in September, and he will start daycare, that may be the first time he will be in a room with so many other children. Will he be overwhelmed?

Dear Husband,

We are the lucky ones. There is not a moment that goes by where I am not grateful for what we have. The pandemic has brought prosperity to our home. It permitted me to advance in my career and for us to gain financial tranquility. But it has also brought into sharp relief all that is flawed and unbalanced in the definition of who bears which responsibility. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, I started a new job, the kids were home and suddenly not only was I ‘Mommy’, I was also the entertainment committee, the preschool educator and chef of the ‘24HR’ kitchen. There were still loads of laundry, but now they were interspersed between Microsoft Teams calls and yelling toddlers. I feel at this moment horrid for even complaining, but the truth is that I have now come to realize I am the ‘DEFAULT’ parent. No matter the importance of the meeting I had at 2pm, if it was taking place during your allotted work time slot, I had to get through that call; screaming children and all. If, on the other hand you had a call, well that was important and there was no way you could handle the kids. 

It is during this time that I have harboured resentment towards you, because apart from the usual Mom guilt and feeling like I had to be everything to everyone, now I was also expected to ensure the kids were doing activities which would stimulate them. I had to make sure they were going outside. Meals and snacks were on demand and there was not a moment’s respite. 

I cannot help but acknowledge that for years before this pandemic, I have nurtured the impossible image of being able to handle it all; all the time. How silly we are as women to continue to promote this ridiculous and unattainable image, only to burn out from mental and physical exhaustion. 

I love you; but there are times when I feel so overwhelmed that I just want to hide in a bathroom and not come out until tomorrow.  I wish I could see myself through your eyes; to see what you see. I wish I could sometimes let go and not feel so responsible for everything all the time. I hope that our daughter will one day be the woman that makes her presence known, that demands respect and that lives in a society where household duties are no longer solely thought to be a woman’s task. We may think this has changed, but it hasn’t changed all that much.

I now know that little by little I need to tell you these things. Tell you I’m exhausted, and I need more of your help. I am learning that in my imperfection, we can still find each other.

  • “I suppose the irony of all this looking back is that it was not Finn that prevented my sense of travel and freedom and independence, but really the COVID-19 pandemic! My third trimester was spent at the beginning of the pandemic, being confined to our home. It was a stressful time, especially with policies changing all the time at the beginning, for instance, at one point the Jewish General Hospital was not allowing partners into the delivery room. My doula who I had really connected with would not be allowed to attend my birth.

    Well-meaning people would send me articles starting to show the particular risks for pregnant women with COVID-19. And I had even less opportunities to have medical visits in person with my doctor.”

  • “I guess you could say that since the world shut down and the social isolation measures  have been in effect, I have been facing my own inner life and reflecting upon what my  family line has lived and how I am connected. Even how, I am writing to you where?  Where are you? Life everlasting is a mystery.

    There is nowhere to go, so I’m home. Racing around much less. Reflecting. Dreaming. Integrating.  Sometimes I am angry and frustrated and other times this year has been a great  blessing. I know you would pray for me to find the blessings. I miss you.”

  • “Because we are so limited in what we can do (no friends, pool, library, playground, etc.), we have been closely observing the seasons change and learning about birds and trees. At first I was worried about what my daughter was missing out on, but gradually noticed that she is very happy.

    For me, spending so much time with her is sometimes a strain, sometimes lovely, but largely tolerable if lonely. I'm grateful that I'm not worrying about missing the school year or trying to home-school like many people with older kids.

    I am not, however, looking forward to having an unexpected toddler at home during my maternity leave, as I fear will happen.”