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.)