In her eight years at 3 News, anchor Sara Shookman never expected to be reporting from her basement. Shookman, who is nine months pregnant with her first child, started working from home in March when the first cases of coronavirus were reported in Cuyahoga County. She spoke with us about being pregnant during so much uncertainty and how her work on the 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. broadcasts has changed over the last month.
Because I am pregnant, as soon as the first cases popped up in Cuyahoga County, we started having a lot of conversations led by my managers about, “Hey, are you comfortable? Is there anything we can be doing to make you feel more safe?”
There continue to be so many unknowns about coronavirus and pregnancy and newborns. And I wasn’t the only one. They were having those conversations with several other people in the newsroom who are immune compromised for various reasons. Initially, as a journalist. I thought, Wait a second, this is a huge story. I’m not going home. I need to be a part of this. Knowing that I’m going to be out on maternity leave, I have my own neuroses about being gone and being out of that part of my life, which means so much to me.
At the very beginning, I don’t think I understood how prevalent it would become for so many people to be working from home in our industry and what was technically possible. [But] I feel like I'm contributing just as much as if I had been in the building. I’m really happy with how that has worked out.
There was something kind of neat about it at the same time that this was possible. And there’s certainly a huge relief off my shoulders that I felt like I was able to [handle] one of my first challenges as a mom and the new mom adventure. I was able to do my job in the way that I wanted to be doing it and also protecting my baby and not have to choose between those two things.
I feel for other pregnant women out there, and I had a lot of conversations. Social media has been great for that. I think because we’re all bored, we’re all more dialed-in, but I’ve heard from so many people about the adjustments that are being made right now. People say, “We’ll make do. This isn't exactly how we envisioned it.”
We ordered our infant CPR kit on the American Heart Association website, and we taught ourselves at home since our class got canceled. The hospital experience is going to be different. We're going to make the best of it. That sort of attitude and just getting to talk with these other women has really helped inspire me to have a good attitude about it. I think with all birth plans, any of the advice will tell you to be flexible because you never know how these things are going to go. And I think this is just one more level of flexibility. — as told to Aly Fogel
