ST. LOUIS — It was late April, about a month into the COVID-19 pandemic, when Christina Lee Sterling was laid off from her job as a corporate lawyer.
"We were pretty panicked generally, and then we found out we were pregnant," she said. "It was a mix of complete elation and total stress and anxiety."
Lee Sterling, 34, had been furloughed near the beginning of the pandemic, like so many millions of Americans. Even in those early days, when uncertainty about the danger of the virus and its impact to the economy was so high, she and her husband, James, still wanted a child.
"In our minds it was kind of like, there's never going to be a right time, there's never going to be a perfect time," she said.
Over the next nine months, through the relative normalcy of the summer and the virus surge in the fall and winter, Lee Sterling carried her first child against a backdrop of one of the most uncertain times in modern American history.
She's the first to acknowledge she can be a little high-strung. But during the pandemic she had time. No social engagements. No meetings. No deadlines. Just the baby. Time to plan and rest.
"It was surprisingly liberating," she said. "I can't control so much right now, so I might as well lean into it and enjoy the fact that nothing is predictable at this point."
The St. Louis couple took all the social distancing and mask-wearing precautions, even more so after she was pregnant. Her husband's job didn't allow him to work from home, so there was always risk that they couldn't control. While the world didn't know when a vaccine would be ready, or when things would be normal again, Lee Sterling knew when her baby girl was due.
"All the different milestones during the pregnancy, each ultrasound, it gave us something to look forward to," she said. "At the risk of sounding incredibly cliché, it was just a very tangible hope, a light at the end of the tunnel that, no matter what happens, we have this amazing thing to look forward to."
In January, Mackenzie was born healthy.
"Not knowing when the world will return back to normal is stressful," Lee Sterling said. "But on the flip side, our focus is now her. I worry less about everything else around me because I'm focused on her specifically."
