Working moms always have it hard. It’s not just the everyday hassle and lack of leisure or the stress. There is quite a lot of psychological pain in leaving your little one in someone else’s care so that you could attend to your career. Guilt plagues us working mothers and in 2020, with a pandemic in full swing, things are just worse.

I’ll be lying if I said I don’t panic now and then. Being a healthcare worker, I’m one of those people on the frontlines, hoping the storm doesn’t hit me – hoping against all logic and reason. With every fresh piece of information, my panic rises in a wave and given my experience in surfing those waves, I think it’s befitting that I share my coping strategies.

1) Your baby

With panic and despair, comes my anguish about the things I can’t do with my child. But he is also the greatest distraction I’ll ever need. So many things to discover in them and wonder about, babies and also children are a gift to humans in times of distress. One gummy smile and a few whining cries and you’ll realize why and how to be strong at heart. With a fear for the immediate future, it would be hard to dream of the distant, but you always know there is hope.

I have never felt more complete in my life – I know it’s different for other women, but I truly believe there is some comfort in knowing that you have lived long enough to have loved and made life out of that love.

2) Your husband

Near or far, husbands have the ability to annoy us, amuse us, appease us and sometimes admonish us. And we need to be annoyed at irrelevant things, amused by lame jokes, appeased for imagined insults and admonished for unhealthy obsessions, to survive a pandemic.

It goes against some radical feminist views, but I believe we all need our significant other to face our real and imagined fears.

3) Your hobbies

You get where I’m going with all this, don’t you? For those of us who are stuck at home, hobbies is essential, but they provide quite a relief to those of who don’t have the time too. Taking a few minutes out of your busy schedule is all it would take for you to catch up on your favorite series or read a mini story or cook a little something.

I take the 2 minute date featured in How I Met Your Mother as the inspiration for those of us who complain about being too busy:

4) Your work

What better distraction than work? Although in my case, I often feel like an impostor – I need to reassure my anxious patients about the pandemic, but there is just do little we know about it, even as doctors.

So if say, a guy comes up to me with, “I have a cough and a headache! Could it be covid?”

All I can say is, “Take these medicines, don’t worry about it too much. See me after 3 days if it doesn’t get better.”

But what I’m thinking is, “Let’s hope for both our sakes it’s not what you think it is!”

5) Your future beyond Covid

This is my favorite passtime. I don’t daydream about the future, oh no. That vould jinx it for all I know 😛 . What I do is prepare for it.

I read for exams I may take on 2021 November. I browse for toys and books to get for my little one once he’s 9 months old. I look for travel destinations to add to my bucket list. I do all this to reinforce the idea in my brain that there is hope, lots of it and that there is quite a bright future after all this is over.

That could be factually or logically a misassumption. But throw those doubts away for now.

What you, your baby and your society needs is hope and mental strength. Gear up to defend your family and community from the invisible enemies – it’s not just the virus we have to fight, but all our inner demons too.