Pregnancy During Pandemic

The pandemic was a very odd time to be pregnant. All the ideas I had about community and gathering and connection was very different, but also in a way I didn’t have to share this time with anyone besides just my husband and I. I had a small bubble I could reach out to, I could share what I wanted to share, and read what I wanted to read without that added pressure of what peoples idea of this time is supposed to be. If there are silver linings to this – that would be it.

Here are a few books that spoke to me:

Before

Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America by Nefertiti Austin

The thing about being a mother is that it’s different for everyone and hearing stories outside my world view was something I sought before I found out I was pregnant. Especially in a country that views parenthood from a white lens. Nefertiti finds her way to motherhood by adopting a Black child and faces the stereotypes of single Black motherhood, of the foster care system, and raising a child in this America.

Toolkit for Tough Times: A Sheltering Place

Happy Starts at Home.  These days, it can take a bit of doing to get to happy! For some it is, exactly, how to work with My Small Space and others, My Bedroom is an Office and Other Interior Design Dilemmas.  See what I mean?

It takes work to get to that Clutter-Free Home and to do so you might need to employ a Clutter Remedy. Everyone cannot Be Bold and bodacious enough to just Keep This, Toss That at the drop of a hat.

Help is closer than you think. If you’ve been wondering How to Make a House a Home or want to create a Beautifully Organized, Cozy Minimalist Home with Holistic Spaces, stay tuned. Even if you are renting and on a tight budget, there are options at hand.  You can Rescue, Restore, Redecorate and cozy up your place in fabulous Rental Style.

Ideas for making your space fit your needs without breaking the bank are possible. For starters, some neat ideas can be found in Affordable Interior Design.

From Small Space Living to Shared Living, from a house roomy with rooms to a rooming house, apartment, cottage or shed, every configuration of housing has a singular purpose, shelter. Every person needs a space to shelter in this world. For some, it is far more serious than simply decorating. Too many people are in the need of shelter, of finding shelter, right now.

Three on a Theme: Pandemic Philosophy

As we progress into what seems like the umpteenth month of this pandemic, the long-term effects of what it feels like to be isolated from loved ones, constantly exposed to news reports about death and infection rates are starting to feel quite exhausting. Even though some lockdown measures are slowly thawing (have you tried curbside holds pickup yet?), we are still far from returning to the way things were pre-pandemic. Here are some philosophical texts that deal with some of the psychological, political, and social struggles of being in a pandemic for the long haul.

Contemporary Plays Available as E-Books

Months into this pandemic, Seattle’s theatres are still dark and the Central Library’s amazing play file is still behind closed doors. Nonetheless, there are still ways for you to access play scripts virtually and stay engaged with some stimulating contemporary theatre as we all await the theatres’ re-openings. Here are three plays that are available to you even during the library’s closure as E-books on OverDrive.

Sweat by Lynn Nottage. Nottage is one of the strongest and most influential playwrights of our time, and her 2015 play Sweat, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is shining evidence of this. The play takes place in a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania and focuses on the struggles of the working class of that area. It explores problems of income inequality, gentrification, and racism among the people in that community, and it also jumps between different moments in time show the evolution of these problems over almost a decade. It is certainly a biting portrait of what economic oppression looks like in the 21^st century, and its entanglement with many other social injustices. Sweat was to have opened the 2020 Season at Seattle’s ACT Theatre.

Pandemic Post-Apocalyptic Podcast

It was amazing, astounding, this loss of communication with the world. It was exactly as if the world had ceased, been blotted out. …With the coming of the Scarlet Death the world fell apart, absolutely, irretrievably.
– The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London

Just a handful of years after the novella quoted above came out, the world was plunged into a global pandemic that claimed over 50 million lives. Jack London didn’t live to see it, but he had recently witnessed the ominous return of the Black Death, a startling outbreak of bubonic plague in turn-of-the-century San Francisco that is recounted in David Randall’s Black Death at the Golden Gate. What’s more, he had the foresight to know that worse – much worse – was to come:

Now this is the strange thing about these germs. There were always new ones coming to live in men’s bodies. …the more men there were, the more thickly were they packed together on the earth, the more new kinds of germs became diseases. There were warnings. Soldervetzsky, as early as 1929, told the bacteriologists that they had no guaranty against some new disease, a thousand times more deadly than any they knew, arising and killing by the hundreds of millions and even by the billion.  

While not all of the predictions in London’s vision of America circa 2013 ring true – personal dirigibles, anyone? – his pandemic prophecies have only gained force. In H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, humankind is saved by micro-organisms; in London’s The Scarlet Plague, these same germs turn on us, and almost win. Looking back from the year 2073 on the devastation, an old man attempts to teach his grandsons how to relight the torch of civilization, with the aid of that most precious tool: books!