Mothering during a pandemic

Women across Southwest Florida share their personal stories as they parent through the coronavirus pandemic.

Charge nurse juggles unknowns

Meredith Burt is a charge nurse at NCH Baker Hospital who typically oversees four nurses each shift. She has three kids and a husband at home.

The 41-year-old knows well how to juggle, adapt and stay calm. But she admits it was unnerving at first when the novel coronavirus hit. Especially when her hospital unit had the first COVID-19 patient.

A priority with her kids — ages 7, 14 and 18 — was explaining on a level each could understand how she is safe at her job and they would be safe, too. Burt works the day shift, arriving at the hospital at 6 a.m. and leaving around 6:30 p.m.

“Home-schooling, that was a little challenging at first,” she said.

Her second-grader, Eamon, who goes to Tommie Barfield Elementary on Marco Island, had to adjust to his school work online while her eighth-grader, Caelan, had no troubles with her school work from Marco Island Charter School. The eldest daughter, Maddy, a senior at St. John Neumann Catholic School, had live Zoom classes.

Her husband, Chris Burt, who owns a nursery on Marco Island that has stayed open since it’s outdoors, comes home each afternoon to make sure the kids are all on track with school.

The pandemic has meant the kids are spending more time together when before everyone was on the go with their own activities, she said.

“I really enjoy more family time,” she said. “We have more family dinners. My girls have learned how to cook and they are baking.”

The family has started a garden and recently used home-grown basil for dinner.

Burt developed a detailed plan for decontaminating herself after each shift.

She leaves the hospital with a fresh mask and changes her clothes before getting home to Marco Island.

She uses hand sanitizer in the car and the day’s work clothes go immediately in the laundry; the same goes for the clothes she drove home wearing. She hops immediately into the shower and uses a bleach spray to wipe it down when she is done.

“It takes at least an hour, including the half-hour drive home,” she said.

She doesn’t feel overwhelmed by the pandemic, in part because the hospital is making sure everyone is safe and she reads the literature about the virus to keep current. And she is back to sleeping well at night.

“In the beginning I didn’t. It was the fear of the unknown,” she said. “I have to be calm for everyone on the floor, and positive and optimistic.”

— By Liz Freeman

Immokalee advocate is mother to many 'whether it’s blood or not'

A few weeks ago, Gloria Padilla-Martinez delivered a food package to a mother whose two children had recently tested positive for coronavirus. 

The mothers locked eyes, separated by a window. Padilla-Martinez could not hug the woman. Safety procedures prevented them from interacting physically.  

“Just not being able to hug her, you know, to let her know that everything was OK even though there's a window between us, that we’re taking care of her,” Padilla-Martinez said. 

Both women managed to smile at each other, which spoke volumes, she said.

“The smile that we both had was undoubtedly an act of trust, an act of love,” Padilla-Martinez said.

Padilla-Martinez is an area coordinator for the nonprofit Redlands Christian Migrant Association, or RCMA. She also works on the Immokalee Unmet Needs Coalition committee to advocate for her families and help acquire what the area needs. 

Her own two children are grown, but Padilla-Martinez acts as a mother figure to all of her families, specifically children, she said.

At the height of the coronavirus pandemic in Immokalee, Padilla-Martinez and other volunteer leaders have been showing up to testing sites, delivering food and putting together packages for families.

Last week, Padilla-Martinez spoke to the mother again over the phone.

“It’s amazing that they’re (families) so appreciative of just a bag of dry goods,” Padilla-Martinez said. 

There’s more than one way to be a mother, Padilla-Martinez proves that, said her daughter, Leann Perez.

“A lot of people that I have met do call my mom ‘mom’ and the first time I heard that I thought it was pretty funny,” Perez said. “People look at her and they think she’s a huge part of the community.”

Perez, 32, and Priscilla, 27, have shared their mother with migrant families since they were children. Perez said they were never bothered by that because they knew she was doing what’s right. 

Both daughters have witnessed families and mothers seek out her guidance. No matter what circumstances, she finds a way to help, Perez said. 

“She’s always had that motherly instinct, whether it’s blood or not, it’s there for her.” 

— By Rachel Fradette

Fort Myers sports mom keeps busy

This is supposed to be a busy time for sports mom Joella Consolazio.

Her oldest daughter, Allana, should be gearing up to take her final bow on the softball diamond as Fort Myers High School makes another deep postseason run. Junior varsity softball should be wrapping up for her other daughter, Lexi, and Joella should be constructing her schedule to attend her youngest son Dominic’s lacrosse games.

However, the global pandemic turned life upside-down in the Consolazio household, a sports family if Southwest Florida ever had one. 

Joella hasn’t relinquished her role as sports mom. In quarantine she gets better at it every day. She is a support system for a daughter whose senior season was cut short — the Florida High School Athletic Association cancelled the remainder of the spring sports schedule. But she remains an integral part of making sure her children continue to hone their crafts even in isolation.

“We’ve learned to cherish the time we have together as a family,” Joella said.

She still can’t escape the heartbreak of her daughter, a News-Press first-team all-area outfielder who surely would have been in the mix for Player of the Year honors this season, missing out on one more chance at competing for a state championship.

Because when her daughter hurts, she hurts.

"It tears you apart. I get choked up, I get upset," Joella said. "I hurt because I know what she's feeling and what she's missing."

Although Joella knows Allana can't experience what should have been some of the biggest moments in her life, Joella’s focus has been on making smaller experiences larger.

She’s celebrated certain special days like the last day of school with special meals. When Allana, who will play softball at the University of South Florida next year, was named Prom Queen, she was paraded through her neighborhood on a golf cart in her prom dress and crown as neighbors cheered.

It still drives Joella and her husband, Pete, crazy that their family — which spent six or seven days a week at an area sports complex — can’t be out there. Instead, the family runs, bikes, shoots hoops and exercises together.

They stay ready for the time when their children can return to the athletic fields and they can take their seats in the stands.

"I just can't wait to get back out to the field or the weight room just to watch them again," Joella said. "As a sports mom, that's my life living through them and their experiences. I really miss it."

— By Adam Regan

Patience and laughter fuel Alva School teacher

Never underestimate the power of patience and humor.

That’s the life lesson Stacey Anderson has picked up since pivoting to distance, or virtual, learning, where she’s teaching math to about 95 Alva School seventh-graders while juggling the home-based learning of her three children — Abby, 10, Emma, 7, and 6-year-old Nathan.

It’s an “exhausting” experience that has left the 33-year-old with little sleep as she tries to make sure everyone’s needs are being met.

She's learned it is best to keep her children busy in the family's Gateway home by conducting science experiments, doing art projects and playing games that tie in their day’s lessons. But it still makes for a "tight schedule," considering she still needs to make herself available to students, run lessons, answer emails and grade assignments.

“That gets overwhelming when you have five different Zoom sessions that you have to organize on one computer with three kids who just want to show everybody the rabbit,” she said of her family’s pet, Raspberry.

That’s why Anderson, a Golden Apple winner from 2019, has embraced the humor in all of it.

This can be seen in a “blooper” clip she shared on her Google Classroom. It was later posted on the Lee County school district’s Facebook page with the words: "We get it parents, it can be tough to teach at home."

Anderson was trying to film “a step-by-step video” on surface area for her students. About 11 seconds in, she is interrupted by a robot arm, which enters the screen from the right and starts petting her hair. The toy was operated by her kindergartner, Nathan.

Anderson stops talking. She stares straight at the camera. And then the laughter starts.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers through the laugh, burying her head in her hands. “I can’t do distance learning. I just can’t do it.”

That kind of interruption happens “every time” she’s working with her students. Nathan even made an appearance in a Zoom chat this past week dressed as Superman.

He performed a “full-on dive in front of the screen” while telling Anderson, “Look, Mom, I can fly.”

“All you can do is laugh,” Anderson said.

— By Pamela McCabe

No prom? No problem, with a mom like Jorie Maddi

It looks like a standard prom portrait: King and queen in tie and tiara, sashed and grinning under an arch of balloons with disco lights sprinkling the ceiling. But peer a little closer, and you see a little boy’s bare foot in the corner of the photo, on a floor that’s decidedly suburban living room rather than high school gym.

Which make sense, because 17-year-old Rylee Thurmer didn’t make it to her long-dreamed-of North Fort Myers High senior prom. “She was devastated,” her mom, Jorie Maddi, said. “Lots of tears and her boyfriend was upset too, because he was so looking forward to taking her.”

So Maddi just shifted gears, throwing a DIY dance in the living room of her Babcock Ranch home — and pulled it off as a complete surprise. Making something positive and happy in the midst of such a scary, sad time was important to Maddi, a determined bright-sider whose children are her priority.

That creation was more than just the long-awaited dance with the boyfriend Rylee hadn’t seen in 42 days; Maddi also enlisted the help of her work friends (she’s a Lee Health labor and delivery nurse/supervisor), who lent a selection of formals.

Her 15-year-old daughter Reese pitched in to make a boutique for the borrowed gowns in the room shared by her 4- and 5-year-old little brothers — Rona’s Dress Shop — “and we turned Reese’s room into her hair salon — Quarantina’s — and I ordered a bunch of stuff off of Amazon and we had a portable speaker with the laser lights and disco ball – the whole nine yards," Maddi said. (All on the same day she’d arranged a drive-by birthday salute for her husband’s 40th, since they weren’t on their intended cruise.)

This is just the high-touch, high-energy way Maddi mothers. “I’ve always been the Positive Polly of the bunch," she said. "I’ve always tried to see the best of everything even in the worst of situations.”

Not that she’s unrealistic about things. “Yes, everybody around us is scared, and it’s not that I wasn’t either — obviously working in a hospital and doing what I do, I was definitely nervous, but I just chose the route of trying to find the silver lining,” she said, “And I think it brought our family closer."

— By Amy Bennett Williams

A pandemic isn't frightening if you have your children with you

Nicole Serici has a 21-year-old daughter, Breana, and an 11-year-old son, Christopher. But she celebrates her third Mother's Day this year.

Serici has had custody of Christopher for only that long. The coronavirus crisis isn't frightening to her as long as she has her child. Home schooling is a little more intimidating.

"I don't know everything," she conceded, surveying the cluster of Naples efficiencies where she has just started her second job as a manager. "I still keep in touch with my guardian ad litem. Sometimes I have to call and ask 'How do I do this?'"

It is a learning curve not many 39-year-olds are still climbing, Serici knows. But she emphatically wants other women to know they can do it: "You have to learn to ask for help."

She had spent a good deal of the 20 years before 2015 in drug addiction, as deep as heroin "and just about everything else," Serici  admitted. With it came arrests and jail time; twice, she recalls, wincing, her children were taken away.

The gravity of her situation hit her in 2012, Serici said, when she had to make the decision to take her own husband, with major brain damage after a drug overdose, off life support. But it was three more years before she walked into her probation supervisor's office and announced, "If I leave here I'm going to die."

The only help they could offer at that point was jail. Serici took it.

She fought her way back to sobriety with the help of Narcotics Anonymous. And she worked the case plan the Department of Children and Families had given her, even with their discouraging assessment that Christopher be adopted, rather than returned to her.

Serici finally felt confident to visit her own family back in New Jersey. She still remembers the day, the airport, her attorney's astounding phone call as she was ready to board a plane for her return to Naples: "Are you sitting down? They just changed your case plan to reunification." 

Today, Serici works two jobs. But she carefully manages her time to be with Christopher and stay in touch with her daughter.

"My purpose today is to be emotionally and mentally and physically available for my kids," she said. "Not just Mother's Day, but every day of the year."

—  By Harriet Howard Heithaus

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