Last night I rang in the new year with my best friend and my super-cute husband at a fancy New Year's bash. It was an important milestone, not only marking the beginning of a new decade but my first New Year's as a mother, a mother who still knows how to get dressed up and spend a night on the town, I might add. The boy was spending his first night away at his grandparents' house, while his daddy and I got some much needed adult time: a whole night to ourselves, complete with crisp hotel sheets and morning coffee in bed.
Nonetheless, I spent much of the night thinking about the boy, my new life as a mother, and my efforts to build our family and create a home life that reflects my ideals. Of course, this is pretty much what I think about all the time and what I have been blogging about on my old blog since Colin was born 11 months ago. And so it occurred to me that maybe it was time to start a new blog, one that better reflects my interests and experiences, since I'm no longer the girl from Arkansas who blogged about living and traveling in Europe, without a husband, a child, a dog, a cat, a job, or a single care in the world. And when better to start a new blog that on the first day of a new year?
So this afternoon, as I ate my black-eyed peas for the coming year's good luck (an old Southern tradition that we observe religiously in my family), I resolved to finally give this new blog idea a go. So here goes...
Friday, January 1, 2010
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Real Life
This afternoon, I slipped out of work early and headed next door to take advantage of the “free” Thursday-afternoon viewing at the local art museum. I’m definitely putting this in the “benefits of work” column on my should-I-stay-or-should-I-go list, as art is a big part of my life—or, rather, it used to be before I became a mother. I like to fantasize that if I were a stay-at-home-mom I would have all kinds of time to revisit my old hobbies and interests. More likely, though, is that all the extra time would be eaten up by additional childcare and housekeeping responsibilities. At the very least, I am fairly certain that I would never make it to the free Thursdays at the museum, seeing as how they start at 4:00 p.m., which is right in the middle of the boy’s nap. And without a salary I could never afford to pay for the regular admission.
Anyway, on this Thursday, I caught the last day of the museum’s Ron Mueck exhibit, titled "Real Life." Mueck is a hyperrealist Australian sculptor with a background in toymaking and puppetry, so his sculptures of people (in sizes ranging from twelve inches to more than thirty feet) have an eerie verisimilitude. Walking into the gallery, I was confronted by a sculpture of a newborn baby of truly monstrous proportions, but rather than be startled or horrified (imagine the diapers!), my maternal instincts kicked right in and I wanted to scoop him up and cuddle him, as impractical as that would be.
Other than the fact that this newborn was 20 feet long, everything about him was to scale—from his little half-moon fingernails to his shiny, knotted umbilical chord. And there was something about his large swollen eyelids and that full head of silky black hair reminded me of the first time I held my own son. Oddly enough, I felt more maternal at that moment, in the gallery, than I did upon first becoming a mother. So, perhaps it is true, what they say, that sometimes it takes a little while for motherhood to really grow on you. Or maybe I should just chalk it up the emotionally manipulative effects of hyperrealist art. After all, Mueck’s sculpture, which was actually titled “Girl,” had tricked me into thinking it was the doppelgänger of my very own “Boy.”
Moving onto the next gallery, I sat down to watch a video of Mueck creating another of his giant sculptures, this time it was a pregnant woman who appeared to be in the early stages of labor. The scale of the sculpture, which was probably 20 feet high, only highlighted how truly enormous pregnant women look and feel at the end of their pregnancies, and the look of exhausted strain on the woman’s downturned face made the memory of my 28 hours of labor come flooding back to me. Mueck had posed her with her arms held above her head, as if she were some Atlas struggling to hold up the world, and I thought to myself, “Yes, that’s exactly what it was like.” Nonetheless, I was really overcome with the desire to be grossly pregnant again myself, because Mueck’s hyperrealistic woman—even in her very lifelike pain—looked so unbearably beautiful.
I couldn’t help noticing, also, that Mueck’s woman looked a lot like me. The same pinkish skin and auburn hair, the very plain and regular features, the completely average figure. “Surely, I never looked that beautiful while pregnant?” I wondered. I certainly never felt that beautiful. I was perhaps the world’s unhappiest pregnant woman. Other women have told me that they were never so happy nor loved their bodies so much as they did while pregnant. They rave about the thickness of their hair and their glowing skin, but I only experienced chronic static and adult acne. In addition, I was nauseous and suffering from brutal heartburn from the first month to the last, and I got even less sleep when pregnant than I did in the weeks after my son was born. But for all of that, I would have given anything to be pregnant all over again.
Making my way out of the gallery (after all, I had to get home in time for the five o’clock feeding), I started calculating the months before I could get pregnant again and finally be a stay-at-home mom to a newborn—and to my eldest child. I have only just started my period again, now that my son has started eating solids, so if I got pregnant this month, I would be due in June. “A summer baby, how lovely!” I thought. “We could walk to the park every day of my maternity leave, where I could nurse in the dappled sunshine and watch the 18-month-old navigating the playground for the very first time.”
But as lovely as that would be, with two children under two, I’m fairly certain I would never have time to spend an afternoon at the park, let alone on any of my longed-for hobbies. Also, even in my hormonal haze, I could see the lapse in logic that concluded that I should have a second baby just so that I could finally stay home with my first. Isn’t there any way I could just stay home with my son and still have the means to make the occasional visit to an art museum? I wondered. Then just as I was walking out the door, in walked two mamas, each with a baby in a sling, and they, too, looked remarkably like me.
29-day forecast: Stay at home.
Anyway, on this Thursday, I caught the last day of the museum’s Ron Mueck exhibit, titled "Real Life." Mueck is a hyperrealist Australian sculptor with a background in toymaking and puppetry, so his sculptures of people (in sizes ranging from twelve inches to more than thirty feet) have an eerie verisimilitude. Walking into the gallery, I was confronted by a sculpture of a newborn baby of truly monstrous proportions, but rather than be startled or horrified (imagine the diapers!), my maternal instincts kicked right in and I wanted to scoop him up and cuddle him, as impractical as that would be.
Other than the fact that this newborn was 20 feet long, everything about him was to scale—from his little half-moon fingernails to his shiny, knotted umbilical chord. And there was something about his large swollen eyelids and that full head of silky black hair reminded me of the first time I held my own son. Oddly enough, I felt more maternal at that moment, in the gallery, than I did upon first becoming a mother. So, perhaps it is true, what they say, that sometimes it takes a little while for motherhood to really grow on you. Or maybe I should just chalk it up the emotionally manipulative effects of hyperrealist art. After all, Mueck’s sculpture, which was actually titled “Girl,” had tricked me into thinking it was the doppelgänger of my very own “Boy.”
Moving onto the next gallery, I sat down to watch a video of Mueck creating another of his giant sculptures, this time it was a pregnant woman who appeared to be in the early stages of labor. The scale of the sculpture, which was probably 20 feet high, only highlighted how truly enormous pregnant women look and feel at the end of their pregnancies, and the look of exhausted strain on the woman’s downturned face made the memory of my 28 hours of labor come flooding back to me. Mueck had posed her with her arms held above her head, as if she were some Atlas struggling to hold up the world, and I thought to myself, “Yes, that’s exactly what it was like.” Nonetheless, I was really overcome with the desire to be grossly pregnant again myself, because Mueck’s hyperrealistic woman—even in her very lifelike pain—looked so unbearably beautiful.I couldn’t help noticing, also, that Mueck’s woman looked a lot like me. The same pinkish skin and auburn hair, the very plain and regular features, the completely average figure. “Surely, I never looked that beautiful while pregnant?” I wondered. I certainly never felt that beautiful. I was perhaps the world’s unhappiest pregnant woman. Other women have told me that they were never so happy nor loved their bodies so much as they did while pregnant. They rave about the thickness of their hair and their glowing skin, but I only experienced chronic static and adult acne. In addition, I was nauseous and suffering from brutal heartburn from the first month to the last, and I got even less sleep when pregnant than I did in the weeks after my son was born. But for all of that, I would have given anything to be pregnant all over again.
Making my way out of the gallery (after all, I had to get home in time for the five o’clock feeding), I started calculating the months before I could get pregnant again and finally be a stay-at-home mom to a newborn—and to my eldest child. I have only just started my period again, now that my son has started eating solids, so if I got pregnant this month, I would be due in June. “A summer baby, how lovely!” I thought. “We could walk to the park every day of my maternity leave, where I could nurse in the dappled sunshine and watch the 18-month-old navigating the playground for the very first time.”
But as lovely as that would be, with two children under two, I’m fairly certain I would never have time to spend an afternoon at the park, let alone on any of my longed-for hobbies. Also, even in my hormonal haze, I could see the lapse in logic that concluded that I should have a second baby just so that I could finally stay home with my first. Isn’t there any way I could just stay home with my son and still have the means to make the occasional visit to an art museum? I wondered. Then just as I was walking out the door, in walked two mamas, each with a baby in a sling, and they, too, looked remarkably like me.
29-day forecast: Stay at home.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Great Expectations, Part I
Something just didn’t feel right. It was a sunny summer’s morning, and a lovely woman with pink highlights and funky glasses was leading us on a tour of a local daycare facility when I started to cry. We had toured the baby room and saw a half-dozen happy one year olds padding across the brightly coloured carpet. Then we had toured the toddler room, where about twenty precious toddlers were twirling around in spasmodic dance to the tune of “This Old Man.” And finally we were in the “Big Kids Room,” where the three and four year olds were dressed in pajamas (it being “Pajama Day”) and showing off their “Memory Books” with all the things they had done in the past year at the Centre. Photos pasted onto construction paper and decorated with stickers and glitter showed them collecting leaves in fall and building snowmen in the winter. In the spring, they looked on with wonder as they set free the butterflies they’d raised in the Centre’s terrarium, and in the summer they ate pieces of juicy watermelon on a field trip to a local organic farm.
“We try to get them out into nature as much as possible and give them the sorts of experiences that will help them grow into humane adults,” said the woman with the pink highlights. And that’s when I lost it. Although everything about the Centre exceeded my expectations, it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t want the Centre having those experiences with my son, I wanted to be sharing them with him.
This was not at all what I had expected.
I had expected that if we just found the right daycare centre, one that shared all of my crunchy-creative childcare philosophies and was within easy commuting distance from our house, that I would feel fine about leaving my child to go to work. After all, I liked my job. I had fought tooth and nail to get it. And I had only finished paying off all the student loans that bought me the credentials to land such a job in the first place. But all that suddenly went out the door when I was sitting in the car with my husband and was finally able to unburden myself of the tears I'd been sucking back during the final half-hour of the tour: “I wanna stay home with him. I don’t wanna go back to work.”
The funny thing was that I had already been back at work for four months when this crisis of conscience hit me. Although I had been eligible for up to one year of maternity benefits from the Canadian government, I didn’t qualify for any leave time from my employer because I had been at my current job for less than a year. So, fearing that my employer would not hold my job for me, I agreed to return to work when my son was just three months old.
At the time, I considered myself lucky. After all, I was an American, and in America, most women are only entitled to six weeks of unpaid leave after the birth of a child. I was getting twice that--and I was being paid almost 50 percent of my salary. What a good deal! However, with any government entitlement program, as nice as the benefits may be, there are always unintended consequences. In my case, it was the unavailability of daycare for my infant. Because most Canadians do have a year’s paid parental leave, their children don’t generally enter daycare until they are a year old. Perversely, this means that there are too few daycare spots for infants under a year. Although we had been on wait lists for spots since I was four months pregnant, we were told time and again that our spot hadn’t yet opened up. The latest prediction for the first spot that was likely to be available for us was February 2010--when Colin would be over a year old.
But my return-to-work date couldn’t wait for that, so we cobbled together childcare as best week could. My mother-in-law came to stay with my son for part of the summer, and my husband stayed home with him for the other part. Now, as my husband transitioned back to his teaching job, we had put our son in a dayhome. As much as I loved our dayhome provider -- a smart, spunky mama of two precious little girls--the commute to her house, some 20 kilometres from ours, was proving just too onerous for our already jam-packed schedule, so we were touring a new daycare facility that would be adding twelve new spots to its baby room in a couple of months.
The long and short of it is that I'd been juggling work and motherhood pretty well, or so I thought. I had found a quiet room with a lock to pump twice a day so that I never had to supplement my son’s breast milk with formula. I had worked in emergency childcare relief for my husband's last-minute meetings in between important interviews of my own. I had just landed the cover of the magazine I write for (a first!). I was back into my pre-baby wardrobe. And all of this on top of the fact that I was so sleep-deprived that just making it to the office by 8:00 a.m. in clothes and makeup was itself a Herculean achievement. So, I was feeling I had that old work-life boogeyman pretty well licked. Sure, I was tired and had no time for myself, but that was par for the course with working motherhood, right? At least that’s what the women’s magazines, volume after volume of chick lit, and my own working mother kept telling me. And there was a certain adrenaline rush I got from having done it all--and done it all well--that felt pretty good. But then, the cracks started to show.
The weekend before the game-changing daycare tour, we had spent visiting relatives in Toronto, and without being able to play catch-up on the household chores over the weekend, the homefront was starting to look like a war zone. Four bags of laundry awaited my immediate attention. The dust bunnies where starting to hop across the hardwoods in herds. Every plant inside and out had died from neglect. And there wasn’t a single thing to eat in the fridge that hadn’t been pureed.
Then I got a call from the kennel where we had boarded our cat and dog for the weekend. Remy, our border collie, had spent the entire weekend in solitary confinement because he couldn’t be trusted to play in the yard with the other dogs. He would single a dog out from the group, back it into a corner, and proceed to hold it there and bark at it until one of the supervisors rescued the poor pooch. “It’s probably that Remy’s not being mentally stimulated enough at home and so he’s creating games for himself by herding up the other dogs,” said the kennel manager, an owner of border collies herself. “But he can’t be allowed back here until he gets this behavior under control.”
I immediately signed up for a course in dog agility training and planned extra obedience exercises and mental games in addition to our daily routine, but I knew that adding even a single half-hour per day to our already jam-packed schedule going to be a stretch. The killer was, that while I was on maternity leave, my high-energy doggie had been an angel; however, since I'd returned to work, he'd slowly gone feral.
But dirty houses and tempermental dogs are setbacks I can tackle without bursting into tears. What unleashed the floodgates in the parking lot of daycare centre was something much more emotionally raw, and so much harder to predict. (Read Part II tomorrow.)
“We try to get them out into nature as much as possible and give them the sorts of experiences that will help them grow into humane adults,” said the woman with the pink highlights. And that’s when I lost it. Although everything about the Centre exceeded my expectations, it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t want the Centre having those experiences with my son, I wanted to be sharing them with him.
This was not at all what I had expected.
I had expected that if we just found the right daycare centre, one that shared all of my crunchy-creative childcare philosophies and was within easy commuting distance from our house, that I would feel fine about leaving my child to go to work. After all, I liked my job. I had fought tooth and nail to get it. And I had only finished paying off all the student loans that bought me the credentials to land such a job in the first place. But all that suddenly went out the door when I was sitting in the car with my husband and was finally able to unburden myself of the tears I'd been sucking back during the final half-hour of the tour: “I wanna stay home with him. I don’t wanna go back to work.”
The funny thing was that I had already been back at work for four months when this crisis of conscience hit me. Although I had been eligible for up to one year of maternity benefits from the Canadian government, I didn’t qualify for any leave time from my employer because I had been at my current job for less than a year. So, fearing that my employer would not hold my job for me, I agreed to return to work when my son was just three months old.
At the time, I considered myself lucky. After all, I was an American, and in America, most women are only entitled to six weeks of unpaid leave after the birth of a child. I was getting twice that--and I was being paid almost 50 percent of my salary. What a good deal! However, with any government entitlement program, as nice as the benefits may be, there are always unintended consequences. In my case, it was the unavailability of daycare for my infant. Because most Canadians do have a year’s paid parental leave, their children don’t generally enter daycare until they are a year old. Perversely, this means that there are too few daycare spots for infants under a year. Although we had been on wait lists for spots since I was four months pregnant, we were told time and again that our spot hadn’t yet opened up. The latest prediction for the first spot that was likely to be available for us was February 2010--when Colin would be over a year old.
But my return-to-work date couldn’t wait for that, so we cobbled together childcare as best week could. My mother-in-law came to stay with my son for part of the summer, and my husband stayed home with him for the other part. Now, as my husband transitioned back to his teaching job, we had put our son in a dayhome. As much as I loved our dayhome provider -- a smart, spunky mama of two precious little girls--the commute to her house, some 20 kilometres from ours, was proving just too onerous for our already jam-packed schedule, so we were touring a new daycare facility that would be adding twelve new spots to its baby room in a couple of months.
The long and short of it is that I'd been juggling work and motherhood pretty well, or so I thought. I had found a quiet room with a lock to pump twice a day so that I never had to supplement my son’s breast milk with formula. I had worked in emergency childcare relief for my husband's last-minute meetings in between important interviews of my own. I had just landed the cover of the magazine I write for (a first!). I was back into my pre-baby wardrobe. And all of this on top of the fact that I was so sleep-deprived that just making it to the office by 8:00 a.m. in clothes and makeup was itself a Herculean achievement. So, I was feeling I had that old work-life boogeyman pretty well licked. Sure, I was tired and had no time for myself, but that was par for the course with working motherhood, right? At least that’s what the women’s magazines, volume after volume of chick lit, and my own working mother kept telling me. And there was a certain adrenaline rush I got from having done it all--and done it all well--that felt pretty good. But then, the cracks started to show.
The weekend before the game-changing daycare tour, we had spent visiting relatives in Toronto, and without being able to play catch-up on the household chores over the weekend, the homefront was starting to look like a war zone. Four bags of laundry awaited my immediate attention. The dust bunnies where starting to hop across the hardwoods in herds. Every plant inside and out had died from neglect. And there wasn’t a single thing to eat in the fridge that hadn’t been pureed.
Then I got a call from the kennel where we had boarded our cat and dog for the weekend. Remy, our border collie, had spent the entire weekend in solitary confinement because he couldn’t be trusted to play in the yard with the other dogs. He would single a dog out from the group, back it into a corner, and proceed to hold it there and bark at it until one of the supervisors rescued the poor pooch. “It’s probably that Remy’s not being mentally stimulated enough at home and so he’s creating games for himself by herding up the other dogs,” said the kennel manager, an owner of border collies herself. “But he can’t be allowed back here until he gets this behavior under control.”
I immediately signed up for a course in dog agility training and planned extra obedience exercises and mental games in addition to our daily routine, but I knew that adding even a single half-hour per day to our already jam-packed schedule going to be a stretch. The killer was, that while I was on maternity leave, my high-energy doggie had been an angel; however, since I'd returned to work, he'd slowly gone feral.
But dirty houses and tempermental dogs are setbacks I can tackle without bursting into tears. What unleashed the floodgates in the parking lot of daycare centre was something much more emotionally raw, and so much harder to predict. (Read Part II tomorrow.)
A Note on This Blog
This blog is a project. A project to help me blog through my some of my issues with first-time motherhood. Issue #1: To continue in my current career as a writer and editor or to embark on a different sort of career as a stay-at-home mom to my now eight-month old son?
It's a question almost every mother has faced, probably at several times during her life, but few of the mothers I know ever talk about how they reached their decisions. And how I wish I had their counsel now.
As for me, I've given myself a month to decide. I'll air out all of the factors that go into my decision here, sort of taking my daily temperature on the matter (i.e. do I still want to quit my job on days when the work goes well, or just on the days when I've been up all night with a teething baby and I leak breast milk all over my new blouse and my editor acts like an ass?). Instead of talk therapy, think blog therapy. Perhaps I'll get reader feedback, more likely I won't. But I'm a writer, and I've found that the only way I work through ideas is to write about them. So, here goes.
... oh, and when the month is over? I'll probably keep blogging. I'm sure there will be many other issues that crop up along the path of motherhood, fraught as it is with so many tangles and snares, and I'll need the space to work them out. If you're dogged by the same intractable questions, I invite you to share this space with me, and maybe these decisions needn't be so hard. Nor so lonely.
It's a question almost every mother has faced, probably at several times during her life, but few of the mothers I know ever talk about how they reached their decisions. And how I wish I had their counsel now.
As for me, I've given myself a month to decide. I'll air out all of the factors that go into my decision here, sort of taking my daily temperature on the matter (i.e. do I still want to quit my job on days when the work goes well, or just on the days when I've been up all night with a teething baby and I leak breast milk all over my new blouse and my editor acts like an ass?). Instead of talk therapy, think blog therapy. Perhaps I'll get reader feedback, more likely I won't. But I'm a writer, and I've found that the only way I work through ideas is to write about them. So, here goes.
... oh, and when the month is over? I'll probably keep blogging. I'm sure there will be many other issues that crop up along the path of motherhood, fraught as it is with so many tangles and snares, and I'll need the space to work them out. If you're dogged by the same intractable questions, I invite you to share this space with me, and maybe these decisions needn't be so hard. Nor so lonely.
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