Just when I thought I had my life philosophy generally in order, I am being asked to explain it. And it’s not until you have to explain and teach something that you realize the gaping holes in your own logic!

As B talks more and more, he asks more and more questions.  Some of them he can answer himself, and I can see how his logic is developing and the leaps he makes in his mind.  For example, he asked me the other day, “Mama, what do fish eat?”  I asked him, “what do you think?” And then he goes, “Well, cats eat cat food, so fish eat…fish food?”  Click.

But then we got more philosophical.  “Mama, what’s married?”  Good question.  When two people love each other…nah, they can just cohabitate of course.  When mamas and daddies want to have a baby…nah, they can also just cohabitate, or they could be divorced.  Ummm…”mama and daddy are married.”  Blank stare.  I don’t blame you, kid.  When you get to stuff that is either arbitrary or symbolic or both (depending on your own views), good luck explaining that in simple terms.  B is a smart kid, but I just can’t for the life of me get to an acceptable (to him) explanation of marriage and weddings.

Frankly, I’m not sure I totally understand it.  Sure, we’re married.  I would say that 70% of the reason we got married is for legal reasons: if anything happened to either of us, it would be a royal pain if we weren’t married.  Plus, you know, health care.  It saved us a small fortune once R started staying home with B.  Then there’s 20% that can be attributed to various friends and family members being uncomfortable about us not being married.  Should we have ignored that?  Perhaps.  But I see it as similar to the battle to wear whatever you want to work, you know?  I mean, fight the man if you must, but in the end you’re just hurting your own chances at a career.  I get that this is a controversial opinion, but that’s how I think about it.  I pick my battles very carefully and this wasn’t one I was going to fight.  Besides, what difference did it really make to us if we were married or not?  And that gets me to the other 10%: there was something about marriage that was attractive, in that I felt sort of like “this is what comes next…right?”  It was part of the relationship trajectory, in a way.  But why?  I can’t explain that.  And certainly not in 2-year-old vocabulary.

Love,

US

R: “Nice.  You know, if you buy into all that wedding stuff.”

Me: “Which I don’t.”

R: “Yeah, neither do I.”

It’s so good to hear how you are doing!  I remember getting ever bigger – and when people say that you have no idea how big you’re going to get, they are 100% right.  By the end of it, I was huge!  Forty-two pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight, but that describes nothing of the giant midsection to carry around.  I have some maternity clothes in the basement that you should use – I will tell them to bring them up for you – and you will see that some of them are just so much bigger than you ever imagined yourself being.  I remember that  it was fun sometimes, not fun sometimes, but looking back it is nothing but amazing that my body did that.

So much to say…where to start…and I should be reading right now in the first place.  Since I disappeared temporarily I had Spring Break: two weeks of hanging out with B, sleeping in, and just living a relaxed life.  The first week, B was a mess and would not let go of me for one minute (including all night long) for fear of me going off to work again the next morning.  The second week, after a day of being sick (it always hits me once I start relaxing), B settled in and it was just a great week.  Nothing I had to do but go to the playground and hang out with him and his friends and other parents – oh the wonder of talking to other people who understand the highs and lows of having a toddler! It was wonderful.

And then work began again.  My reading is even worse this quarter, I would estimate around 1,500 pages a week.  And that’s not fun reading – I mean, I like it, but it’s not beach reading.  I’ve been sort of dreading April for awhile now, because there are lots of “extra things” going on this month.  By that I mean, just taking care of my five classes (ok, only two really demanding ones, but still) is enough work for a week.  But this week I had the department social and a workshop.  This weekend my in-laws are in town for a wedding (to which I was supposed to go but R is going without me because there is just no time).  Next week I head to a conference in Texas.  (The first time EVER away from B overnight!  I’m sort of excited for some personal space and also terrified and worried and fighting all my “bad-mommy-abandoning-your-child” emotions.)  The week after that is his second birthday.  I guess this is exactly it, right?  Academic life?  All this stuff you love to do  and then all the other extra stuff – some good, some bad – that gets in your way.  It’s good to get used to it now.  But it’s hard when we are also worried about money (savings nearly depleted), trying to find a preschool for B, trying to find a pediatrician for B, one of our cats isn’t happy right now and we don’t know why, R knocked the driver’s side mirror off of the car, my iPhone randomly decided to kick the bucket, and oh God the laundry…  And that’s life as a mother, a wife, and a Ph.D. student, in a nutshell.  Ninety-five percent of the time, I love it, most of it anyway.  And then sometimes you hit that five percent where you think, wtf am I doing?!?

This morning, I was about to head out the door and noticed R taking the sheets off of our bed.  I usually do the laundry but I had mentioned (likely multiple times because I am a stressball) that they were really dirty (the cats like to nap on our bed, as cats do).  Now, here is my thought process: “OMG, but my in-laws are coming over and then there won’t be sheets on the bed. That’s messy. Well, they probably won’t care.  But then maybe they’ll go out and then the sheets won’t go into the dryer until later.  Then they won’t be done when I get home after work and that’s annoying because then I end up having to deal with them.  If I’m going to deal with sheets and all that, I should just save it until tomorrow and we’ll ignore the dirty sheets tonight.  But shit there is a lot of laundry to do and maybe I can’t do it all tomorrow.  But I am home by myself tomorrow afternoon so B can help me, he likes that.  But maybe R will be able to finish them in time and then the sheets will be clean and that would be great. It’s nice of him to think of dealing with them. But shit, I really hate it when I get home and everything is upside-down and the sheets are somewhere in the dryer not quite dry yet…no, I can’t handle that today.  I can do it tomorrow.”  Well, that’s a pared-down version of about one minute in my head.  What actually happened was that I said, “Oh no! Don’t do that now because then they won’t be done and then I’ll have to deal with them when I get home and aarrrrrgggghhhh.”  To which R said, “I was going to get them done before that but FINE.” To which I said, “but then you don’t get them done in time and then I have to deal with them.” (This is true I would say about 60% of the time.) And then he goes, “FINE.”

And that is how it all plays out when I’m stressed out, which is why Life Generally just works a LOT better when I’m not stressed out.  Because I weigh every. single. tiny. decision in my head as if it’s a Big Giant decision, and I’m just better at parsing out my answers when I’m more coherent, that’s all.  Sometimes I wish I could live a less parsed-out life, and then I realize that is exactly what my work is: weighing every single tiny decision and not ignoring any possible option or detail.  What makes me good at my work is what makes me terrible at, you know, everything else.  My work comes naturally to me; the rest of life is what I have to work hard at in order to not alienate everyone.

Love,

US

It’s funny how the compulsion to write diminishes: it’s not that I am not reflecting; more than ever in my life, I feel involved in being. I feel mindful when I walk, when I breathe, when I sit on the couch. When I went to acupuncture last week, for the first time in 3 months, Marina was shocked when she read my pulses.

“They are like the pulses of a different person–they are so strong!”

Before, there was always weakness, the struggles against stress, the “liver” which always reacts to the tumult of the environment; and now? They have righted themselves. She says that most pregnant women’s pulses change, but she had to witness mine to believe how much they could change. How strangely good to be so healthy, physically and in the psyche.

I did convince her to give me one needle–the one for sexual joy!

The weather has also been bringing me back to life: I walk and walk, though last week, I overdid it, with the frenzied fear of becoming fat (the dismal prospects of maternity fashion do not help the self-image, either) which is still well intact. I gain all my weight in my legs, it seems. But when I overdid it last week, I had a whole episode of the old nausea and vomiting. Could it be that this baby needs me to have legs like the Statue of Liberty to hold him up? Apparently so!

Well, if I could breathe my way into accepting all the vomit, I guess this is the next new challenge: breathing my way into accepting monster legs. There has to be a better term. Mother’s legs. Well, vonR does not seem to mind. I had no idea he would be so attracted to a pregnant body. He calls me Fertility Goddess; now, why can’t I feel that way about myself, especially in those vile dressing room mirrors? Clad in crap-brown khakis, or jeans with an unimaginable, stretchy elastic thingamajig? With the fitting room attendant saying “buy bigger–because you are only beginning to grow.”

Yikes!

How did you deal with it, US? This takeover by the flesh…

The unsolicited advice also seeps in, but so far, I have been able to nod and deflect.

Today an artist friend is coming over to sketch Russian folktale characters on the nursery walls: we have started moving around the apartment.

Space is being made here.

I’m reading Iris Murdoch, seeing good friends and taking walks, cooking, puttering around; vonR is taking boxing lessons, and also learning to control his anxiety a little better; Pearl continues to teach us how to postpone to the next day. Things just don’t bother me the way they used to. I do not exactly know where this skill of filtering out the turmoil, or the drives for literary publication, or pleasing impossible bosses and infelicitous career paths, or over-caretaking those who can take care of themselves, all of which were tripping me up, comes from. I do not have the time for those things. There is some important work before me. I hope this groundedness is here to stay.  I am smiling at people I don’t know. I am easing my way off medication.  I am approaching 42 and marriage and this afternoon’s lunch with equal apprehension. I don’t know what’s next, besides a baby on sling sometime in August, and some things to teach him, some things to show him. Whatever it will be, no matter how crazy and exhausting, I feel capable. On my big thick legs, connecting me to the earth. This life suits me. I must have been ready for it. Just ask my pulses.

YY

Funny how long it has been since I have written here…life has been taking me on its course. Is it possible to enjoy it too much?

It’s Spring!

It’s been a full week since I stopped throwing up! I’ve been slowly resuming life outside of the apartment: yoga, meditation, pilates, walking, walking, walking, cooking dinner with friends (shad is a-swimming up-river!), re-configuring apartment. Pearl has become a very devoted cat here on the inside too…It is all very slow, the way I like it–as if that is what I learned from being sick: to postpone almost everything and watch how it takes care of itself. Even the  mess of the apartment feels okay: there is life here, after all, and life takes up space; life leaves a trail.

Yesterday, on a walk around the reservoir, I saw by lucky chance one friend who is expecting in June, and another who has a one year old. It feels as if there is an underground network of mothers out there–ones I could not see before, or let myself see. It also feels so good to see people in the neighborhood who wish us well, people who haven’t seen me since I vanished in January. In those interactions, it comes home to me more and more how worried vonR was, and what a supportive partner he has been through all of this.

And will continue to be!

The recent anatomy scan showed a healthy, four-chambered heart. VonR was more relieved than I was–he was afraid that my illness affected the fetus; clearly, it can take care of itself (as long as I give it a place to swim!). To think, two cells met once, and all of this sprung forth, this entire being which has its own parts, chambers, mysteries, little astronaut, little swimmer.

Very soon, we will be visiting your friend the Honorable Sidney S. A very small event! Once again, it feels as if vonR and I are figuring out our own way of doing things, that’s how low key this will be. We aren’t telling anyone when it is til after it was. We joke that we will be telling this baby all kinds of our weird wisdoms someday: “Take your time! No need to get serious about anyone or start a family til you are fifty!” Or–”Get a PhD and few MAs; live overseas for 10 years or so; by the time you are done, you may have a slightly less fuzzy idea of what you want to be when you grow up.” Indoors whiffle ball. Couch yoga. Bachelor salad (lettuce leaves, eaten straight  off the head). Buy the top of your wedding dress but no rush about finding a bottom (it’s a long story).

We are both reading through this book you probably know, “The Baby Book,” by  William Sears. It has the reverse effect of “WTEWYAE” in that it allays fears, and affirms your natural intuitions instead of second guessing them for you. It is the first baby book I’ve read where I don’t get more nervous; instead, as I often feel when I read about you and B, it feels more like Christmas morning is approaching, the experience is about to begin! What will it be like? I have started looking for a labor companion a.k.a. doula–amazing how hyper some of them seem. I’m looking for one where I can get a word in edgewise–and instead of feeling desperate to find one, I feel good about it; the right one will turn up. I also signed up for classes at St Luke’s. The energy from the pre-natal yoga class–and seeing so many women so much further along, each in her own groove–is reassuring, too.  Baby likes upside down!

How does it feel to almost be the mother of a 2-year old who can read and who drinks Brammacinnos in his convertible????

Does he realize he will probably be our landlord someday??!

I hope he goes easy on us!

Love,

YY

Every week, I think “oh now, I’m at x weeks, it’s going to get easier” until I learn that it is in fact “x+1″ weeks at which things get easier.

The trouble is, even though I am still throwing up (now it’s just unpredictable–good days, a few good days, and then a string of bad ones), I’m aware that there are practical things which need to be done: finding a doula, registering for classes, setting up a nursery, getting clothing, finding a maternity-wedding dress (I am hoping for red). Resigning myself to those jeans with the waist cut out.

Getting my poor head around “What to Expect When You’re Expecting: Year Uno.”

There’s a book to make you choke!

What I need is “What to Expect Today.” Or “What to Expect the First Week: Day by Day.”  Or “Don’t Worry: Ignore the Hype.”

I feel the pull of getting too easily caught up in the worry-farm of “what to buy so my baby will be normal”; and I am well aware that there is a spiritual path here, somewhere, but it still feels swampily flooded with nausea.

Mostly, as Pearl sleeps at the end of the bed, and another gloomy dark day unfolds, I feel very very grateful for the peace and quiet!

Love,

YY

What you write in “The glass on the other side” reminds me of how I felt about work in the fall: I was trying to identify a shift I felt, between this rigid category called “work” and this other category “things I like to do.” It felt like there didn’t need to be so much of a divide, or that I was questioning where the divide came from, who set up the divide’s terms, and if there was another way to conceptualize it all.

It’s fascinating and inspiring to read about how your feelings towards mothering evolve. How you are reflecting on the nature of time itself–and how it sounds like you are enjoying more and more pieces of time, however they come to you, whatever their labels are.  In part what is also inspiring is the thought that yes, things will and do change–in “Psych” you write about letting B cry at length, and then having feelings about that, and then having feelings about those feelings, etc, etc–all a long evolution, in which ultimately there is a lot of understanding and self-acceptance. And wow, B is a person; you’re in love with him; sometimes you fight; sometimes you are in awe–but that’s a very rich relationship you are having, Ma’am!

Basically, I want to be in the parallel universe version of B’s room, at his little imaginary cafe, while he cooks and talks. I want to be sitting on the couch with vonR when we have had our own OMFG DO NOT TOUCH MY BABY! afternoon. I want to walk this little baby round the neighborhood, so it can smell the greasy-n-good french fries, see the apple blossoms on the tree where I have my bike locked up, know the feeling of waiting for the too-long traffic lights, hear the guys playing horns on the corner.

I was so resistant to doing this for so long. I felt sorry for people when they announced they were pregnant (She’s giving up her life! She’s going to be a slave! She’s ruined!). I decided to do this because it seemed like it was my last chance. Because vonR wanted to. Because what I could see of you and B, and other glimpses I had when my guard was down–it did look like fun! Like something I could find my way through without doing harm.  There wasn’t a terrible lot of me in the decision though, exactly. There was a lot of ambivalence and fear. That’s just what it was, and it makes sense, knowing how I grew up, how I was shaped.

So, where did all of my recent joy come from?

All of this excitement?

And a feeling I’ll call strength, or groundedness?

VonR has been freaking out about things from time to time; it rattles me a little and sometimes a lot, but at the bottom, I  have this good feeling that everything will be okay, even if that means I am a single mother. That is, I feel capable in a way I didn’t before. And where did that come from?

And this acceptance?

How did this shift occur?

Ah, it was blueberry pancakes Monday, then throwing up 6 times on Tuesday, but it evolves, everything feels just as it should be.

How utterly lovely and weird.

Love reading you here, wish you all were heading east–I’m still mostly living above 79th street!

YY

The curious thing about parenting is that you can sort of imagine what it will be like for you and your partner, knowing your personalities and ways of life, but you can’t really see what the specific challenges or triumphs will be until you’re there.  Mostly, I think this is because the best and worst moments are little manifestations of what I would have previously considered to be detailed moments of my life.  So, I decided to think about the particulars that are the hardest and easiest things, much to my surprise – either because I expected them to be otherwise or because I never thought about them in the first place.

Things that are hard, for me at least:

- Having patience.  Here’s a secret: your own kid can be annoying, too; not everything they do is cute.  (Even though a whole lot of it is.)  And trying to deal with B when he’s having a bad day, yikes.

- The things that were boring to do with my cousin’s/neighbor’s/friend’s kid are still boring with my own kid.  Except now I have to do them every day.

- Your kid doesn’t care about your problems.  If you feel sick, they. don’t. care.  You could be vomiting and unable to stand up, they still just want to go to the playground and wtf are you doing o the couch, lazy mama?  As an attention-seeking terrible patient, this is very hard for me when I have a migraine, don’t feel well, am truly beyond exhausted, or generally have other things on my brain (you know, like dissertations).

- There is no such thing as spontaneity with my kid.  Or if there is, it’s terribly scaled back.  We need to be on top of all meal times, activities, etc.  We can’t just sit around in the morning babbling about what we’re going to do later that day; we need to be up and out the door before he disassembles the house.  Plus, we can’t plan while he needs our attention.  So we have to plan the night before for the following day, including getting addresses together, etc, and we’re not all that good at this one.

- There is no such thing as losing track of time.  Breastfeeding pretty much obliterated this one, but anyway, it still holds.  I miss being able to just sit and talk without thinking about how much time was passing and then suddenly realizing it was 2am.  I need to get home on time, I need to get to bed on time, I need to get Bram food on time…

Things that are easy, for me at least:

- Not going out.  We used to love to go out at night, and now I really do prefer to be at home.  I like sitting around and chatting or being on my laptop, cats on my lap, B in his bed.  Just being here with everything in its place, it’s really enough.  I don’t feel the need to find a babysitter and go out, I really don’t.  People often try to pressure us into going out and neither of us feel the need at all.

- Understanding my toddler.  I think this probably has a lot to do with him inheriting a lot of my personality traits, but I really do understand him very well.  This is very satisfying, and it makes me hope that even though I make mistakes as a parent (like yelling), in the end we will have a close relationship overall and be able to talk about anything, any time.

- Adjusting to a non-stop life.  Sure, I have moments when wish I could lie on the couch.  But in the end, I’m happy that every moment of my day is filled with work or toddler.  I like being busy, and I like having so many reasons to get up every single day.  I like being exhausted at the end of the day.  I like my life full.

Love,

US

What you described in your post seems borderline abusive.  Your baby is not a psych experiment like I used to participate in when I was in college to make $10 for 40 minutes of filling out a survey.  R immediately went off on a rant about people who have too much intelligence and no social skills and are passing on their lack of social skills.  He has a “thing” about that.  Anyway, I have to admit that I kind of, sort of understand.  I remember the newborn, the tiny ball of unhappiness, craving you you you.  So I guess I understand the general intent, certainly not to the degree to which these parents have taken it, but the general motivation. Obviously, you simply can’t start implementing your own strange psychological notions with a thing that relies 100% on you for everything, but the fact that it relies on you is something that either sits well with you or it doesn’t.  Some people love having a creature who relies on them every minute of every day, it gives them a purpose and fulfills them.  I was not one of those people, so I understand wanting to escape from that – not enough to do something insane like that, but I remember the smothering frustration, the caged feeling.

When B was about a week old, we left him in his crib once while he cried. He would cry for 4, sometimes 5 hours in the evenings and we just couldn’t take it any more. Everyone kept wanting to visit and hold him and I kept having these visceral OMFG DON’T TOUCH MY BABY!?!! reactions. We were overworked, overstressed, overtired, over-everything-ed.  So we left him.  For 45 minutes.  He never stopped crying, and, more importantly, I had no real emotional reaction.  It felt a bit wrong but it didn’t affect me emotionally beyond that.  We eventually went back in and rocked him and he went to sleep. My reaction came months later, when it suddenly it hit me how damn awful that was, that we did that, and my God how could we have done that?! It still makes me feel awful. I have terrible moments when I wonder if X “bad” thing B does is a direct result of those 45 abandoned minutes. But at the time, none of this occurred to me. I just wanted 45 minutes of no baby strapped to me, 45 minutes of it being about me and not about him.

So do they get it yet?  Apparently not.  My guess is that it seems perfectly rational to use those tactics because for God’s sake that thing is barely human! (Unless they are slightly sociopathic.  I do worry that they will instill sociopathic tendencies in their child with their tactics, but anyway.)  Babies really don’t seem like Human Beings with Feelings and Emotions at that age. They seem like dolls that need you 24/7 and it’s somewhat unclear why exactly. I mean, it’s clear in an extremely obvious sense but for some reason I always wanted to think about it further and it got me nowhere and it felt very unclear.  You feel compelled to protect them yet everyone wants to hold them and touch them and be in your way. You have stitches down there and all sorts of pain in all sorts of places yet no one asks how you feel, they just want to threaten the tiny thing that you feel compelled to protect. You want time to think about how your life has changed and how you can create a new dynamic.

So yes, I can condemn it and judge it, and yes, I think it’s horrible and wrong. But I do slightly understand wanting to make the crying needy thing somehow ‘fit’. Because you don’t think about what you’re doing until months later, and then it’s too late.  The truly scary thing, not that this isn’t truly scary, but even worse would be if their tactics still seem sensible to them years later.

Love,

US

In an effort to call the proverbial spade “spade”, let me start by saying that I tend to be a glass-half-empty kind of person.  I imagine potential dramatically awful results for each option before making a decision; I often expect the worst and am often surprised when I get the best case scenario.  I get that there might be reasons that I should try to “not be this way”, and I concluded long ago that much of this is simply a function of my personality, the way my brain works.

That said, I’ve noticed that I’ve become hard-wired to dislike certain things, often defying logic.  Mondays are a good example: we are supposed to hate Mondays, because, you know, work.  I’ve started understanding that I need to counter the sinking feeling in my stomach because it’s irrational: I love my work.  I get the sinking feeling purely because of my work history and because I think of alternate options – I could be sleeping in, I could be at home with B, I could be running through fields with flowers in my hair – but I never actually think of where I’m going, and what I’m going to do there.  I’m going to school – I like my office space, I like my classes, I like my colleagues – where I will do my work – I like my work.  Instead of thinking of the counterfactual of my activities directly (“if I didn’t go to work right now, what would I do instead right now, today?”) I have to retrain myself to think of the counterfactual more long-run (“if I didn’t have work, what would I do all day?”)  The answer to the first question may seem intriguing, but the answer to the second question is simply awful to me.  So then what am I fearing when I head to work?  Nothing concrete, nothing logical.  I am socially trained to dread Mondays, and for me, that makes no sense at all.

I began thinking about this not because of work, however.  I began thinking about this because of this post which essentially describes not constantly thinking that the grass is always greener on the other side.  I am the self-described queen of the grass disparity so I couldn’t help but think about this and now can’t help but comment on it.  I thought specifically about spending time with B, and how it was work that wasn’t all that much fun to both R and me in the early months.  Now it’s more fun, particularly spending a morning out and about with B is great – although quite honestly, playing with him with his toys, still not the best thing in the world to me.  I feel terrible even typing this, like I should enjoy every waking moment with my child, but frankly, playing with toddler toys is boring.  His imaginative play is incredibly cute, but you don’t understand boredom until you’ve been forced to pretend-sip coffee out of an imaginary cup approximately one-hundred times over the course of two hours.  It beats entertaining a newborn any day, and it sure beats holding him up for twelve straight hours, too.  However, for me, who has trouble watching movies because two hours is a long damn time to sit still and just watch, man! sitting still with a toddler is not easy, especially if it involves a repetitive process of any kind.

As he gets older, the time spent with him does become a lot more fun, though.  And this leads me to a similar situation as with work: once you’re conditioned to react a certain way, it sticks.  My work as a consultant sucked, and I grew accustomed to dreading Mondays.  And I continue to dread Mondays, even though when I think about it logically, I actually look forward to going to work every day.  I don’t mind working weekends.  I read those articles for fun, not just for work; I write for fun, too (obviously).  Similarly, with first six weeks spent at home predisposed me to automatically think that spending time with B will likely be awful and boring.  (I really, really hated my six weeks of maternity leave.  Like, really, a whole lot. I’m still feeling the effects, seriously.)  I still think that putting him to sleep will be psychosis-inducing.  Though the latter is still sometimes true, it’s different now.  Taking him out, showing him new things, is amazing.  Putting him to sleep is hard, but as he gets older he understands more and tells me more and I, in turn, understand him better.  I need to retrain myself to not dread spending long periods of time with him, because logically, I do enjoy it now.  Now that he can communicate, every tough moment has its reasons.  He is acting in a certain way for a very particular reason.  (This is why I disagree with punishment for misbehavior, but that’s another post entirely.)  His insights are illuminating and fascinating.

This all sounds too general as I reread it, like I don’t enjoy my child, and that’s not what I’m trying to say.  I guess I’m trying to express how the first impression of a category of activities sticks with me even after it’s no longer a valid assessment.  I started thinking of my life as work and B.  That was it.  And the goal became, when do I get free time?  The problems with this line of thinking are, I start to resent both work and B, illogically so since I enjoy both, and there is no free time when you’re a parent.  You’re lucky to have “free time” to clean the bathroom, quite frankly. My ingrained notions of what work and parenting are clash with what my work and my parenting time really are.

On a side note, I should also mention that this is a particularly salient application of the idea that I expressed previously about how B is a bit different from other kids.  We get up at 7:30am and B usually gets up with us.  He is up until 10:30pm these days, so I rush around in the morning, go to work, come home at 5:30pm and take over B, and am then in charge until 10:30pm.  We go to bed soon-ish after he does.  When I’m charge of B, he needs lots of attention (he gets overexcited to see me and that never ends well) and lots of indoor activities (LA shuts down early).  So it’s easy to start to see time with B as a chore when I’m in charge of the toughest time of day (we’re both tired at the end of the day, and indoor-only with a toddler…yeah.) and when the hours are so long.  I often wonder how both R and I would view B if he went to sleep at an average hour for toddlers his age.  I wonder if we would see being parents as just as much of a chore.

Today I’m at work.  I just read two articles which were interesting and relevant to my own work.  More importantly, I have my own work.  My own research, my own line of thought, my own creations, my own writings, my own plans.  I have plans galore, research ideas piling up, some of which I may not even have time to get to over my entire academic career.  I have a budding academic career.  When I left the house, B was playing in his bedroom with Raggedy Andy.  He was making him breakfast with his plastic veggies on his plastic stove.  He was turning on the light for him and reading him a book.  He was pretending to light the ends of cardboard tubes to have fires around them, like at the closing ceremony for the Olympics.  Seriously, given those two options, what am I doing wishing for time by myself without work?!  What would I possibly do that would be more interesting and important than either of those choices?

I’m not switching my view of the glass.  But I do need to get a hold of the glass on the other side in this case, and more importantly, not look back.

Love,

US