While I managed to avoid learning how to bake during the early, heavily-quarantined days of the pandemic, I did commit two other pandemic sins. I started a podcast, and I had a baby.
The podcast related to my editorial work. As a research editor at the Washington Papers, I (along with a team of fellow editors) was in the process of finding, transcribing, and annotating all of Martha Washington’s correspondence for a new edited edition of her papers. I thought a podcast would be a great way to share some of her weirder, less frequently cited letters. My favorite Martha Washington letter of all time, where she tells her niece that “children that feed as heartily as yours does must be full of worms,” doesn’t get much love in most biographies.
After Covid hit, everyone at my office began to work 100% from home. Suddenly without a commute, I found myself with enough free time to research and record a niche women’s history podcast. It found a small and enthusiastic audience, and I had a lot of fun making it.
I released my first episode in June of 2020. Three months later, I got pregnant. At that point I figured that the podcast was on borrowed time. It had always just been a hobby, it certainly didn’t make any money, and once the baby came, I wouldn’t have many free five-hour chunks to edit the episodes. To certain members of my family, the fact that I wasn’t quitting my job to be a full-time mom was already unthinkable, and for me to keep a job AND a podcast would be tantamount to neglect. I continued recording and releasing episodes until I gave birth, and then I announced a hiatus, which I suspected would become permanent.
The first few months after I gave birth to my son were extremely difficult. This isn’t news to parents, but hormonal changes after giving birth, combined with lack of sleep, and the unbelievable amount of energy it takes to keep this beautiful little thing alive, leads to something called the “baby blues” in most mothers, even if it doesn’t progress into post-partum depression. I was crying enough that people were starting to worry about me.
I also struggled with my sense of identity. Becoming a mother seemed to be eating up every other aspect of my life, and with Covid restrictions still in place after the Delta surge in summer of 2021, I felt deeply isolated. The resources that did exist, things like “mama and me” exercise classes and support groups over zoom, were cliquey and hard for a weird, introverted person like me to break into. I felt like I was going to have to change everything about myself to fit in and be a good mom, and it was very hard.
Oddly enough, even as I was barely finding time to take a shower, the thing I found myself doing with my infant son asleep on my chest was researching for my podcast. I’d use the hours when my husband watched the baby to edit recordings. I even managed to set up some interviews with scholars, although my sleep-deprived wit was less than sparkling during our recording sessions. To my great surprise, I lifted my podcast hiatus and began to release new episodes. I cried less. I felt more like a human being.
The podcast, more than anything else in those early days, reminded me that I was a historian AND a mother. I could breastfeed my child every three hours AND manage to talk about eighteenth century social mores. The thing that I thought would be easiest to drop became something of a lifeline for me. In the end, I reached out to R2 Studios at George Mason University, and now a team helps me edit and release each episode. This has made it possible to for me to keep up the podcast while working full-time and parenting a small child.
A lot of mommy blogs end with the same conclusion, which is that to adequately care for others, you must first make sure your own basic needs are met. I suppose the point of this entry is that “talking about history in a fun way that you control” is higher than I could have possibly imagined on my personal hierarchy of needs.