She bought a business and had a baby. Then COVID-19 hit.

Erin Gomes’ dream of owning her own auto shop finally came true when she purchased the Mountain View business where she’d been hired as a receptionist more than 16 years earlier.

Not long after giving birth to her second child, she was signing the incorporation papers to take over and open up as Bavarium Autoworks. It turned out her timing couldn’t have been worse.

“And then two weeks later the stay in place order happened,” Gomes said. “Luckily, it’s an essential business so we were able to stay open, I can only imagine if I had bought a hair salon and then had to shut down two weeks later.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown Gomes’ new business, and her growing family, into chaos as they struggle to adapt to health regulations, shuttered schools and the worst economy since the Great Recession. She joins the thousands of Bay Area small business owners who have been rocked by the pandemic, caught between the need to stay afloat and protecting themselves, their employees and their customers from the virus.

“It’s unbelievable. You almost have to laugh because what else can I do,” she said.

Gomes didn’t start out a car fanatic eager to own her own auto shop. When she first started at the Mountain View shop, she was just answering an ad in The Mercury News for a receptionist. The shop, previously called CarBahn Autoworks, was owned by Steve Dinan, an internationally recognized BMW specialist, and catered to European cars.

Gomes took to the job, and when there was an opening for a service advisor she was asked to step in. After a stint working at a BMW dealership, Dinan about four years ago asked Gomes to come back to run the Mountain View shop — he owns a second location in San Jose.

Now sporting tattoos of motor engine parts, Gomes said it hasn’t always been an easy career path.

“People would call in and I would attempt to answer their question and I literally have someone say — on multiple occasions — ‘Can I talk to a man?’” she said. “It’s hard to be a woman in this industry and to gain people’s respect because they can’t imagine that I would ever know or want to know anything about cars.”

When she went on maternity leave before the birth of her second child, Gomes and her husband, a shop foreman at a BMW dealership, decided to open their own business. She called the CarBahn owners to say she wasn’t coming back.

“They said, ‘Why don’t you buy this one?’” Gomes said. “Within a month we were proud owners.”

The shop does everything from oil changes to engine replacements. It also specializes in performance tuning, making sports cars run even faster, she said, although Gomes herself opted for more low-maintenance cars, like older 3-Series and 5-Series BMW sedans.

Although they’re allowed to stay open, business has slowed at Gomes’ shop, where she works with her husband and one…