Do you remember that movie 'Freaky Friday' from 2003 where the mother and daughter switch bodies and are forced to live each other's lives? That's sort-of what it feels like is happening, except without the life lesson of learning to get along and appreciate someone else's life...
On the 28th of June, Greater Sydney entered a two week lockdown after the spread of the Delta COVID variant. With those two weeks having come and gone, and lockdown extended for at least another week, it's quite surreal to watch the rest of the world open back up again. It's an uncomfortable feeling to be limited again in what we can do after months of no cases and relative freedom, but I'm trying to keep the bigger perspective in mind of staying safe and healthy.
The last two weeks we were limited to staying within our household except for four essential reasons - one of those reasons being exercise outside with others. To use that to our full advantage, many of my coworkers and friends started little walking clubs: getting us out and exploring our beautiful neighbourhood. To encourage and boost morale for the YWAM campus, we created a 'walkathon': a 1,000,000 step challenge. We spent the week tracking and adding up our steps to reach 1 million together, and we did it in 6 days with 33,000 steps to spare! It was a great way to connect with people and keep ourselves sane whilst being under the stay at home order.
This upcoming week is bringing stricter rules to our lockdown with the Delta variant gaining more traction in the community. Thankfully our medical system is well set up and there is a great contact tracing system in place. Our biggest issue is the lack of vaccines available, which is due to a myriad of reasons: no manufacturing facilities, the EU barring shipments of vaccines to us, sending what little vaccines we did have to other harder-hit countries... It's a big problem that is even bigger as the disease continues to mutate and becomes more contagious. There is a vaccine roll out in place but the distribution to my age-range won't be for a few more months.
In the meantime, my plan is to keep supporting the mums that we work with in the Peaceful Birth Partnership, and making the most of this pared back season! One of the mums is due to have her first baby any day now, and although my involvement with the birth will look quite different than we had hoped and expected, I'm still looking forward to being with her as much as I can. Doula support is currently classed as essential under 'compassionate care' so I do know that I'll be able to support her labour at home until she needs to transfer to the hospital - under current healthcare restrictions, birthing women in Wollongong are only allowed one support person with them at the hospital, women in other areas are dealing with even worse. In Western Sydney, mums have to apply for an exemption to even have one support person (spouse, doula, friend or family member) with them! Becca, an incredible birth-educator, doula, mum and coworker of mine shared about this issue and explained "Birth is extremely impacting on a mum's mental health and therefore her family & community. Trauma happens when mums feel unsupported and disempowered. I believe we need lots of restrictions to stay safe currently but birthing alone should not be one of those."
Navigating the health system at its best can be a big challenge for many of the women we work with, but trying to do that in the midst of lockdown and harmful restrictions can be debilitating. Still, I am struck time and time again by the resilience of mothers, especially mothers with refugee and trauma backgrounds - they are some of the strongest women I know. "So here's to strong women: may we know them, may we be them, and may we raise them."
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