parenting

‘Emotional whiplash’, ‘pandemic grind’: How I’ve written about reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic

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My final workday in February 2020 was the last time I reported a story before our world was upended.

It was a Saturday. I was in downtown Atlanta, covering the U.S. marathon trials for the 2020 Olympics. I stood amidst a crowd of hundreds, not realizing that option wouldn’t exist in a few weeks. I spoke with anticipation about that summer’s Olympics, not realizing they wouldn’t take place.

Two days later, our second daughter arrived. Two weeks later, while I sat home on paternity leave, the president declared a national state of emergency because of the widening COVID-19 pandemic.

That pandemic has altered our lives ever since.

I plan to offer more expansive reflections on the past year in the weeks ahead, but I first wanted to look back. One of the many personal benefits of this blog is the snapshots it provides of the various moments of my professional – and often personal – life. I share these entries with you now in the hopes they’ll trigger your own reflections on how you’ve changed during this challenging, maddening, extraordinary time in our lives.

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It’s like emotional whiplash: my juggle as a reporter and father during the COVID-19 pandemic

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I click the play button to log an interview I just recorded. I hear a nurse in New York describe a sight from a recent shift.

“I remember I was sitting at my desk,” she tells me, “and the body rolled by on the stretcher to go to the morgue. And I’m thinking, ‘That’s just joining all the other bodies down there.’”

As my fingers type fast to keep up, a voice in the background interrupts.

“SEE YOU SOON, HOPSIEEEEEEEEE!”

That’s my daughter. She’s two years old. She’s in her playpen, one room over from my office. And she’s putting her toy bear, Hopsie, down for a nap.

For the next few minutes, her high-pitched squeals pierce the sentences and sighs of an exhausted nurse: “They have a tent outside the hospital where they take all the dead bodies” – I LOVE YOU, HOPSIEEEEEEE! – “They don’t have enough room in the morgue” – SEE YOU SOOOOOOON! – “It’s not normal for people to be dropping like flies like that.”

It’s certainly not normal. It’s also not normal for me to process upsetting details of a pandemic – and internalize them enough to write a story – while hearing my toddler blissful in the living room. It’s not normal to keep my phone on mute during the morning editorial meetings, so I can cradle my newborn daughter – just seven weeks old – and soothe her cries long enough to pitch a story.

None of this is normal. We are all making sacrifices and adjusting our lives. Many of us know someone who’s caught COVID-19 – or, worse, lost a life from it – if we haven’t faced it ourselves. Many work in fields where they confront the pandemic first-hand every day, from the grocery store cashiers wearing masks and gloves to the nurse I interviewed, witnessing a body get rolled to the morgue.

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The COVID-19 pandemic struck as my daughter arrived. I knew I needed to stay on the sidelines.

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March 13th, 2020 was our baby girl’s due date. We didn’t realize how fortunate we were when she arrived two weeks early, two weeks before the coronavirus pandemic fully overtook most Americans’ lives.

By the time March 13th arrived, the NCAA had cancelled the Final Four, the NBA, NHL, and MLB had postponed or suspended their seasons, and the stock market had plummeted. A day earlier, my state of Georgia announced the first death related to COVID-19. That afternoon the United States officially entered a national state of emergency.

This was clearly, also, a journalistic emergency – the kind where anyone who can pick up a camera or write a script is expected to report. I didn’t. On March 13th, I fed and swaddled my newborn, then picked up my older daughter from day care with the knowledge she likely wouldn’t return anytime soon.

I wanted to work. But I wouldn’t cut short this critical period to do so.

A storyteller’s instinct is to rush to the biggest stories. We romanticize it. I’ve heard reporters boast about cutting short weekends, vacations, and honeymoons to cover the latest breaking story. To some degree – and depending on where you work – that’s part of the job. I’ve spent snowstorms on windy, whitecapped bridges. I’ve missed friends’ weddings to cover the World Series and Olympics. I struggle with these sacrifices, but I understand why they’re necessary, and I hope my friends and family do too.

But I wouldn’t sacrifice this. Months before my daughter arrived, I informed my bosses I planned to take four weeks off: two for paternity leave, and two as paid time off. I resolved as many commitments as I could beforehand, and I cleared those weeks to focus solely on family. No story, I pledged to myself, would reel me back.

Then a worldwide pandemic struck American cities, and I felt torn.

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PODCAST EPISODE #63: Here’s how my journey in journalism affects my view as a dad.

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A few nights ago, I sat in my living room at 3 AM, feeding my daughter while contemplating my first Father’s Day as a dad, when one single moment crystallized my entire fatherly experience:

My baby spit milk into my mouth.

I couldn’t have planned it. I probably can’t replicate it. I had just pulled Olivia’s bottle and perched her on my lap. I had patted her back to burp her, then clutched her against my chest to soothe her. We had sat silently, her head leaning against mine, when I turned my cheek to give hers a kiss. As my lips puckered, Olivia swiveled her head my way and sent an ounce of milk fountaining from her mouth. Most landed on my shirt, some across my face. The rest settled inside my jaw. Dignity.

But it wasn’t her action that encapsulated my life as a dad. It was my reaction. I pffted out the milk, looked at my child, shook my head and laughed out loud in a pitch-black room. I wasn’t upset. I wasn’t grossed out. I felt grateful.

I’ve been waiting so long to be a dad, I thought. A little milk in the mouth is all part of the package.

I often wonder how my job as a journalist affects my outlook as a father, and it’s not always obvious. But in moments like the Great Spitting Incident of 2018, it becomes clear. Same when the twentieth person of the week asks me, “Are you sleeping at all yet?” I am! And what little sleep I lose hasn’t bothered me. Neither have the middle-of-the-night feeds, exploding poops, and impromptu workouts from carrying Olivia on my shoulder for 20 minutes.

I can shrug it off in Atlanta because I remember Sioux City. (more…)

I’m a new father. And I’m aching to control time.

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Last month I became a dad. I wrote this journal entry seven days later and felt it encapsulated my feelings a week into fatherhood.

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Time moves too slow. A new father sits in the dark, his three-day old daughter in his lap. It’s 2 AM. His daughter cries in minute-long spurts and tries to worm her arms out of her swaddle blanket. Dad counters each move while trying to keep his daughter calm and, more importantly, quiet.

Time moves too fast. Yes, I wanted Olivia to stop crying and start sleeping. But even in a half-open-eyed slumber, I wanted to savor the moment.

Mom is sleeping in their bedroom, he hopes. They spent the previous hour pacing around the apartment, cycling through potential causes of the high-pitched pierce they’re sure has awakened their neighbors. But they don’t both need to stand guard. One can sleep while the other sits. Dad volunteered to sit. He wills his eyelids to stay up.

Everything about parenthood so far has been a fight for control. My wife and I have tried in vain to develop a routine. We have scraped together hours of sleep, first at the hospital and now at home. We have learned on the fly how to feed, clothe, change, and swaddle a tiny human who three days earlier existed only in the womb. We should want to fast-forward through this time and get to the good stuff: walking, talking, eating pizza, playing soccer, going to the prom. But then I look at Olivia, and I want time to freeze. Even when she cries, she seems perfect. She is untouched by the world and cocooned by her parents. At least that’s how it feels.

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PODCAST EPISODE #12: Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, American Promise

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One of the biggest challenges of storytelling — particularly when dealing with stories of emotion — is determining what to leave out.

As a reporter for a local news station, I will regularly shoot several hours of video for a story that lasts several minutes. I realized early in my career I would never be able to tell someone’s full story — only as much of that story as I could fit into the allotted space. A news director of mine once crystallized the appropriate mentality: it’s all about eliminating the “good” in one’s story and keeping the “great”.

Of course, sometimes you don’t even get to keep all of the “great”.

And sometimes, as in the case of filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, you shoot 800 hours of video for a two-hour documentary — a documentary in which you are two of the main characters.

Brewster and Stephenson are the husband-and-wife duo behind American Promise, currently playing in select cities and premiering on PBS in February 2014. The documentary follows two young boys from Brooklyn, both black, whose parents enroll them in a prestigious, mostly white collegiate prep school in Manhattan. Brewster and Stephenson began filming in 1999, when both boys — Idris and Seun — were starting kindergarten.

They stopped filming after the boys’ graduation from high school — 13 years later.

To make matters trickier, one of the boys, Idris, is Brewster and Stephenson’s son.

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