Items

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  2020-09-27

  My First Pie and Other Sensory Snapshots

  I gave birth to my first child two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and so to me, memories of this time are centered around life as a new parent. Because we live in a different state than most of our family, and because we had a newborn (whose immune systems are not well-developed the first several weeks of life) in a global pandemic, we did not go anywhere. I had a few months off of work and school to care for my son, so my experience of COVID-19 to that point was time spent just with my son. As any parent knows, those first few weeks are an exhausting blur consisting of the never-ending cycle of feeding your baby, changing them, and helping them sleep. But the sensory memories from this time of my life that have stuck with me the most involve the feeling of holding my baby; feeling his head on my shoulder, hearing his tiny little breaths and occasional squeaky coos in my ear, noticing the sweet smell of his baby shampoo on his head, feeling him stretch and reposition from time to time. Though it seemed like the days when he would sleep independently would never come, little did I know how quickly they would, and how much I would miss these quiet moments. When he started getting the hang of napping, I suddenly had these open stretches of time in my day, which I was not used to. What to do to fill this time, especially in the midst of a pandemic and with a baby to boot? Like many people, I developed a baking hobby while my little one napped. Now I associated his nap time with the sticky feel of flour and butter on my hands as I kneaded dough for soda bread, the smell of buttery, sugary deliciousness coming from the oven as scones were baking. On my husband’s birthday, I produced my most time-consuming bake so far: a strawberry rhubarb pie. This one required some cooperation on the part of my little guy, whose giggles I heard as he batted at toys in his baby swing while I chopped and prepped the filling and made the pie crust. The finished product wasn’t necessarily perfect, but I was proud of it, and the memory of making it will always stick with me since it is a representative snapshot of that moment in time, a few months into a global pandemic with my young son.
• 2021-03-26

  I want...

  I want... To be able to see my friends and without masks. To be able to see my cousin who's one of my best friends. To be able to go to school To be able to play volleyball inside To be able to have fun without worried about my health To be able to see my grandparents and my newborn cousin I haven't been able to meet To be able to have fun and live my life as a kid, the world every kid deserves
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  2020-06-13

  Lovelace Hospital's Secret Coronavirus Policy

  Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico implemented a secretive policy that racially profiled Native American mothers. As expecting mothers who “looked” Native were admitted into the hospital, staff would compare their area codes to a list of zip codes belonging to Native lands such as Reservations or Pueblos. After being identified as “a person under investigation for COVID-19”, mothers were often misled or were forced into signing a wavier that gave permission for hospital staff to remove the newborns from their parents after birth. The families were only reunited once the pending coronavirus test results came back negative. Test results took up to three days to come in, thus leaving the mothers in fear and uncertainty about the wellbeing of their child. Lovelace, Native American, mothers, healthcare, newborns, separation, New Mexico indepth, ProPublica, racial profiling, New Mexico