* * *
—
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.
* * *
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Mandi Freeman didn’t want to quit her job. She’d tried running a home daycare; she’d tried hosting Tupperware parties; she’d tried online entrepreneurship. She’d tried just about everything, and loved none of it. But this job was different. In December 2019, she’d started work as a home care aide—her first full-time gig after more than a decade of mothering her five kids. It immediately clicked. The days were long and often hard, spent bouncing around Cranbrook, B.C., in and out of clients’ homes from morning to night. She was good at it, though. Clients told her she brought something special to the job, and Freeman felt it too: she’d found her purpose. “I was damn good at my job,” she recalled. “This was it for me.” She’d always wanted to help people, and now she could see the difference she made in their lives every day. Plus, she was in a good groove. She had energy, a schedule, a meal prepping system, and she was wearing clothes that were neither pyjamas nor tank tops stained and stretched from nursing. She was being herself, finding her identity. Things were going so great that she’d planned to attend school in September 2020 to get accredited. Then, over the course of January and February, she became the sickest she’d ever been in her life.
Today, Freeman is convinced she had COVID-19, probably caught from one of her clients. Officially, she has no answers. Whatever it was, doctors misdiagnosed it as pneumonia three times. No antibiotic seemed to help. At one point, she was put on doxycyc
line, a powerful drug that treats a variety of serious bugs and that, in this case, left Freeman with a nasty side effect—permanent acid reflux disease. The illness cascaded through her house, and soon everybody was sick. It took most of February for them all to recover and go back to school and work. A couple of weeks later, the world declared a pandemic. Freeman’s children are all under the age of twelve. The oldest is eleven and the youngest is three. Her partner’s job at a metal fabrication plant was deemed essential. So too was Freeman’s. It hardly mattered. With no school and no child care, she didn’t see how they could both possibly continue working full-time. Now, she thinks of her gut reaction as selfish; there was a lot more at stake than her job. At the time, though, all she could think was: How am I going to keep working? She was—rightfully—angry at the virus for interrupting her budding career. That anger blanketed her emotions, turning to numbness. Leaving her new job felt inevitable, no matter what angle Freeman examined the problem from.
After schools confirmed classes would resume online following March break, Freeman knew she’d have to phase herself out of her job in April. During a pandemic, however, that was easier said than done; demand for home help was high and desperate. Freeman told her employer she could only work three hours a day. In return, her supervisor asked if she could get someone down the street to look after her children—a move that would, of course, break lockdown rules. At first, her work commitment only increased; she worked thirty-seven days with no break. Freeman stuck to her guns, though, and slowly, regretfully began to reduce both her client numbers and hours. In the Before Times, she’d work from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., sometimes longer, and come home for a break or two in between clients. In COVID Times, she equipped her oldest daughter with a cellphone and left her in charge after breakfast. Her significantly cut hours also meant she wouldn’t be out of their house for too long. Freeman said she often justified it to herself: they were okay, the client’s house was only a few minutes away, she wasn’t leaving town, the children had eaten breakfast and started their school work. Everything was fine. “Yeah,” she said, “that didn’t last long either.”
In June, she’d emailed her boss to say that she’d need a leave of absence. Her husband had, at that point, been laid off and could stay with the kids. It was all breaking down, anyway. She felt filled and overflowing with guilt, anxiety. There was too much screen time for her kids; some of them were struggling with school. Her eldest daughter was having constant nightmares that her friends were contracting COVID and dying. When her partner was still working, she felt like she was in survival mode: If you want to eat seven granola bars, sure, just have an apple somewhere in between. Twenty minutes of schoolwork is enough, congratulations. Can I go to the bathroom alone, please? They were spending more than they could afford on fast food because everybody was too sad and too tired to cook. Even after her partner was forced home to help, the exhaustion continued. Her kids were crying all the time; she was crying all the time. They hadn’t seen their friends in ages; she hadn’t seen her friends in ages. Nobody was sleeping properly. Freeman felt stuck, and she knew her family did, too. “From mid-March to the May long weekend,” she said, “was hell and depression and darkness and too much TV and laziness.”
While she’d been loath to quit her job at first, in the end it felt like taking back her power—grabbing some control in the chaos. She knew her energy would be better spent at home; she needed to hold on to her kids, both literally and figuratively. She also wanted to be home so she could talk to them about what was happening, guide them through the pandemic. Freeman knew the self-quarantine months would feel like a defining moment of their childhood once they were adults. She wanted them to come out of it as unscathed as possible. To do any of that, she needed to be present. And to help explain the pandemic and the skewed world it created, the way that everything had changed, she needed to first take the time to explain it to herself. She needed to pause, process, and herself grasp what the heck was going on. To her, trying to explain and soothe while lost in a bog of stress and misinformation felt impossible. “I think,” she joked, “I can talk about sex more comfortably with them than the pandemic.” At least with sex, there were books, facts, shows, finite knowledge; she’d experienced it herself. “But to talk to them about surviving a pandemic and what their lives are going to look like afterwards—I don’t have those answers yet.”
She decided to do something radical to interrupt the fear. Freeman loaded up as much as she could fit into her motor home and drove her family out to the bush—no place special in particular. As she put it: you don’t have to drive far from Cranbrook in any direction to hit a dirt road, and then you keep going until you find a creek or a lake. Out there, she helped the kids keep up with school work as much as she could, but mostly she put her emphasis on a different kind of education: safety, comfort, love. Her youngest learned how to swim. Her oldest learned how to read maps. All that bubbling stress began to leak out, evaporate. Soon, her kids were calling it The Best Summer Ever. To Freeman, it wasn’t throwing in the towel so much as it was choosing how her family could best make it through. Frankly, living in the motor home was also drastically cheaper—a big plus after Freeman resigned and stopped driving into town every day for her shifts. Having lost his job, her partner was relying on employment insurance (EI), and once she later went on leave, Freeman’s income was reduced to CERB. In the bush, she wasn’t buying fast food, running showers and baths for seven people, doing endless loads of dishes and laundry. Even in the summer, her hydro bill was $150 every month; now it was $9.
And if she sometimes missed her budding career, and dreaded thinking about September, well, she hoped things happened for a reason. “I can see that I’m going to look back at our time in the bush ten years from now and think, ‘Damn, this is exactly what I needed,’ ” she said. “This is exactly what my children needed.”
“OH MY GOD. WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?”
Alèthe Kaboré, entrepreneur
Six
THE SHE-CESSION
Alèthe Kaboré had planned 2020 down to the last loonie. In October 2019, she’d officially launched her dream business, KYN Apparel, with a splashy runway show in Calgary. Watching the models strut the spotlight wearing her designs—Canadian-weather cuts mixed with bold African prints—had given her the best feeling ever. It had been a risk to start her business and follow a passion so far outside her formal education, but now she allowed herself to think it would pay off. The business loan, tumbling into debt, putting herself out there, everything else she had done to get where she was—it might just work out after all. Kaboré had moved to Edmonton in 2006 from Burkina Faso to study biological sciences at university. Later on, she earned a master of science in public health. Since graduating, though, she had struggled to find permanent work in her field and had been thinking a lot in 2019 about what else she could do—if it was worth it to take the leap. Not seeing many other Black, immigrant women in Alberta’s fashion industry, and having few mentors who looked like her, had caused her to doubt herself more than once. It didn’t help that ever since she was a kid growing up in Burkina Faso, she, like most of her peers, had planned to study science, pursue a stable career, become a doctor or a researcher. “Everybody’s kind of going the same direction,” she said, of the persistent doubt. “And you’re trying to go in a different one.”
Kaboré had always adored fashion, but she didn’t learn to sew until shortly after moving to Alberta, at which point she began to teach herself. She had missed the colourful and vibrant clothes of her birth country and, unable to find anything like them where she now lived, decided to make her own. At first, whenever she wore dresses and blouses with African patterns to school and work, people would ask her if she was heading out to a party after; baffled, she’d respond, “No, this is what I usually wear.” Kaboré wasn’t about to ditch her bright aesthetic, but the ignorant comments got her thinking. She began to imagine a fusion of office wear a
nd African style, and also started experimenting with merging the sunny, dynamic fabric that felt like home with designs that better matched Canada’s frigid climate. Pretty soon, she’d show up to places and people would beg her to make them one of whatever she was wearing. Their reactions gave her the confidence to start taking clothing samples to community events and African Fashion Week shows. The enthusiasm she received there, in turn, built the confidence she needed to try making her budding business her full-time job. People kept asking her for expanded styles, added sizes. They kept saying, more. After the October kickoff, Kaboré got another major boost. In early 2020, she won the African Fashion and Arts Movement’s designer of the year award. Okay, she thought, I can do this. There’s hope there.
Women of the Pandemic Page 12