I feel like I could write this entire blog post in one sentence, and that sentence goes like this:
I am so effing grateful for childcare.
But since you’ve all come to know me as a bit more, well, verbose, hear me out.
When L was born, I proudly stayed home from work for almost a year. It was a complicated year, to be sure, mostly because, though we didn’t exactly plan for this, his dad was home too. L was born in Norway at the height of the recession, and when we returned to the States when he was four months old, I had my part-time adjunct teaching gig on hold until I was ready to come back (talk about gratitude! My boss and department, you know who you are), and Ben had…a law degree, a Masters in law, and no promising leads on a job. So that entire first year of L’s life was spent floating between free living arrangements in various places, L’s mom “home” with him and L’s dad depressedly applying for jobs in the attic at my parents’ house (and then less depressedly doing a few consulting gigs and a summer internship).
You know, in life, you look back on times like that and you remember them fondly? But in the moment, it felt really demoralizing.
When Baby S was born, our lives were just different: I had my full-time teaching gig, with a full course load and benefits, so I went back to work at four months, toting my breast pump with me on the train and trying not to cry during my breaks, when I disappeared into a former broom closet to empty my boobs. With Baby S, I started with three days of childcare, then moved to four, and when he went to his current daycare situation, she told me four was no longer possible: full-time or nothing, baby. I remember the promise I made to myself and to her that I’d keep him home on Wednesdays anyway, do my online class work when he napped, make up for it on the weekends.
But, um, well, I mostly haven’t. Mostly, I send him off to childcare every day like he has a job, and pick him up at the end of the day. And probably because of my two X chromosomes, I’ve felt pretty guilty and conflicted about this over the last year.
Yes, I have the kind of job where I could, conceivably, not have five days of childcare. I’m lucky in this regard. I work some weekends no matter how much I work during the week; I work from home a lot. So the standard of 9-5 care out of my house isn’t always what I need, but it’s what I’ve got. Sometimes?gasp!?I drop off the baby and then go to yoga before getting online. I also do a ton of unpaid work (read: marketing a small-press book). And at times, I have felt this guilt about sending S to “Nonny’s” when I have things on my to-do list like self-care and grocery shopping and schlepping my book to bookstores and sending out promo postcards. Why? I guess because much as I would like to pretend I don’t, I fall prey to The Voices as much as any other woman does: you should, you should, you should. And one of The Voices goes, you should be with your child whenever you can be, at the expense of all else.
And another of The Voices goes: you spent a lot more time with L at this age than you do with S now.
Ouch, Voice. True or not, that feels like a low blow.
But here’s the honest, naked truth: I adore Baby S. Like, he is the cutest thing since cute sliced bread these days. His language is exploding; everything is “no mine!” as it’s clutched to his chest. He calls the dudes he sleeps with his “tuffies.” L is “Weo.” Sometimes the first thing he says in the morning, his hot little cheeks scented with delicious baby-drool smell (trust me, it’s the best), is “Wheah Daddy go?” He likes to pick up things like the TV remote, pretend they’re the phone, and say “Nanaaaa?”
He’s a total riot.
And he’s also the most active baby I’ve ever met. In twenty minutes the kid can stop the washing machine right before the spin cycle, call Australia on my phone, screw up the microwave, and tip an entire box of cereal onto the floor. The stroller can’t contain him; he’s learned how to turn on the hose; and when he says “all done” after dinner, we’ve got about thirty seconds to let him out of his high chair (God forbid he sit still for longer than fifteen minutes!) before he starts throwing stuff. I’m telling you, he’s the cutest menace to society you’ve ever seen.
And so oh, how I love bringing him to daycare. At daycare, they play at the park until they’re exhausted. They play at the water table until they’re exhausted. There are eight little terrors for him to compete with. They exhaust each other. He has a great day, every day. It’s so much more than I could give him on my own. And his caregivers? They love him. One day, worried that he was just too much, Nonny told me: “He’s a little ray of sunshine, and I love him.” I nearly cried, she’s so kind. (She even meant it, you guys.)
You know what I love about childcare? It’s having another trusted, loving adult in S’s life. Not so many of us in America are lucky enough to have a true village anymore, extended family and friends all living close by and raising each other’s kids. So I have to pay for mine.
P.P.S. I’m in the midst of my mini-book tour! To see dates and locations I’ll be reading from Little Prayers, check out my Little Prayers Book Tour page. Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon, here I come. Can’t wait.
HELP WANTED.?Clerical duties include paying bills, recycling child?s drawings of Wild Kratts characters assuming ?creature powers? when child is not looking, and collating massive amounts of wrinkled, unread periodicals. Will consider bonus pay for reading and summarizing of periodicals for resident parents, including six months? back issues of The New Yorker, Harper?s, Rolling Stone, and Crate and Barrel and BevMo! catalogs.
Courtesy of Vegas Bleeds Neon
Occasional light house keeping, including wiping urine off bathroom floor after six-year-old has been in there and scrubbing sink of stubborn sparkly Crest-brand toothpaste.
Also light errands (groceries, dental floss, new stapler, post office, oil change, wine store, etc.). Expect some meal planning/prep of healthy, ?kid-friendly? yet not drearily macaroni-laden meals. Some laundry. Also light carpentry, for ex. fixing mysteriously sticky front door lock, ensuring imminent but humane death of recurrent ants, and hanging of holiday-themed fairy lights on front walk.
Must keep multiple calendars (one on iPhone/laptop; additionally, one hanging in kitchen with endearing photos of nephews), including doctor, dentist, and parent-teacher conferences, and interpret chicken scratch on to-do lists throughout house (on white board in kitchen; on envelope-backs on desk in living room and desk in office). Financial planning skills (including balancing checkbook, paying taxes, and deciding whether $200 is too much for new boots that may last a decade?which makes them much more reasonable at a mere $20/year, if you think about it?) a must.
Ability to be in more than one place at one time a definite bonus.
Required computer skills include basic understanding of Google Docs and backing up of laptop at regular intervals. Also must know how to use so-called ?Cloud? as well as troubleshoot reason thirteen-year-old-but-heretofore-reliable printer does not like to print PDFs anymore (why? WHY??).
Desired interpersonal skills include cheerfulness when on hold with health insurance company for extended period of time; calm demeanor when purchasing airline tickets on Kayak.com, even when resident parents must enforce Austerity Measures to pay for Christmastime travel; ability to not drop aging and battered iPhone more than 2X per week (including not shouting expletives within earshot of six-year-old after said dropping occurs); and devotion to The Japanese Art of Tidying Up, the recipes and personal ethos of Mark Bittman, and yoga. Note: there will be no time for yoga.
Must be willing to pour glass of wine at end of day and assure resident working mother also attempting to write book that she is doing great job.
I know I just wrote yesterday, because I was on this kick about optimism and I really wanted to show some photos of my sweet little garden. But it just occurred to me that actually, I have had something else on my mind for a couple of weeks now, and the only reason I didn’t blog about it yesterday was that the conclusion I was trying to draw hadn’t fully gelled.
Since L switched to a new daycare about a month ago, my childcare time has doubled. This was merely logistical: Lorena wouldn’t take him for less than three days, and she charges the same for those three days whether I pick him up at noon or at 5 o’clock. Initially I thought I would keep him half days anyway, and I picked him up around 1:00 the first week. But he didn’t want to leave, and I felt I was disrupting the flow of the day when I arrived to take him home, since all the other kids were in pajamas and settling down on those little puffy mats in the living room for their naps (“L will never go for that,” I thought, thinking of our very special nap circumstances at home: white noise, stories, special blankies, crib). So after a week or so, I decided, well, I’ll try just one day to leave him there the whole day. Sure enough, L didn’t sleep and came home exhausted and fractious around 4:00 p.m. The following week I thought I’d try once more to have him stay the whole day, sure that it would be a disaster. Well, Lorena called around 3:00 to say that L was sleeping, and had been for two hours. When I went to get him, he was completely and totally happy. And since then, he has settled down on a mat in her living room three days a week with four or five other kids and sacked out at naptime. Then had someone else get him up when his nap is over, give him his snack, and find him something to do.
And I am wrestling with my feelings about this.
I’ll admit I had and probably still have a bit of a prejudice against parents who have kids and then dump them in daycare for outrageously long hours. I know some kids who are in daycare from seven to seven, five days a week. That’s a lot. On the other hand, I realized after I’d been home with L exclusively until he was sixteen months, working from home part-time for some of that, that I wasn’t cut out for full time SAHMness. When I hooked into a nanny share twelve hours a week, writing or working in cafes, I felt like my life began again. I knew then that I would not follow the model of my own mom, who was home with us the whole time we were growing up, or my sister in law, who very cheerfully stayed home with her three kids until they went to school, when she went back to work. At first I thought I had failed in some way for not wanting to do that. Sure, I could have stayed home with L full time; but I wasn’t that fulfilled or nearly as patient as the job demanded.
Since L has started with Lorena I have been amazed at how much more central my work life has become. I’m writing; I’m teaching; I’m blogging; I’m having entrepreneurial feelings; I’m networking. And I’m wrestling with a voice telling me that I’m failing my kid somehow, while all the while I’m–can I admit it?–ecstatic to be working more. I’ve been kind of whispering that to myself and to B, and today I admitted it to a friend, too: I like having L in childcare three days a week. I miss him, sure, but I also love the freedom.
There’s an awful lot of judgment thrown on mothers in particular for their decisions about work. Let’s face it: if you’re in a heterosexual relationship, there’s an easy assumption that the father will work full time and the mother will be the one to make a hard choice. As a feminist I see the unfairness in this; as a crunchy earth mama I also see the logic: I stayed home with L for over a year in part because I wanted to nurse him that whole time. I have made judgments of other mothers myself (I admitted as much, above). I hear those judgments from other people, and sometimes they seem justified (like the family I knew who employed no less than three nannies and a baby nurse, to ensure that the time they spent with their children was about one hour a day–their former nanny, my friend C, and I had a big old judge-fest about that one day). Sometimes I hear judgments when they’re not even there: when my mom says to me, “So, you pick him up when? At five? Really?” I can’t tell if she’s judging me or amazed, since her sole experience with childcare when I was a kid was an occasional trip to Mrs. McNeeley’s, a kid factory down the road with a giant TV that was always showing the Partridge Family. I was sent there maybe twice a year.
It’s dawning on me that, like sleep, work is one of those deeply personal experiences that every mother, and every family, has to figure out on her own. And what’s probably most important is not only the happiness of the children in that family but the happiness that’s being modeled by the primary caregivers. If I’m fulfilled in my life by working part-time, I model that for L. And if another mother wants to be home full time because that’s what makes her happy, then she is modeling that for her kid. And if a woman wants to work full time because that’s what makes her most happy, then she is modeling that for her kid. When a problem arises, I think, is when either the happiness of the kid is so prioritized that the mother is drained and depleted, or when the happiness of the mother is so prioritized that the kid suffers. I realize that “happiness” is perhaps the wrong word to use, here–but I use it to mean fulfillment, ease, contentment.
For me, being a “good” mother means finding balance, and balance for me means working out of the home some days and home with L some days. Our closeness does not seem to have changed since he’s away from me twenty hours a week. We’re still thick as thieves. And I am, I guess, a working mom. I like to ride my bike to pick him up between 4:30 and 5:00. Usually I have spent the entire day glued to the laptop, and I welcome the physicality of the ride. We weave our way home through the streets, chatting the whole way. He dutifully reports on what he had for lunch and which kids were there. Then he tells me about naptime.
“Were any kids talking during nap?” I ask.
“No,” L says. “They were quiet.”
I wanted to post a link to this blog, Little Brown Mushroom, which was just sent to me by my friend B. The latest post, “On Being an Artist and a Mother–A Conversation,” really hit the spot for me today. I was frantic to turn in progress grades (the bane of my existence, progress grades), dealing with a student situation, lamenting the fact that two of my childcare days are done for the week and I haven’t even looked at my book, and wondering how I was going to wrap up all of this angst in a little ball and bury it before it was time to go get dear sweet L. Then I read this:
I just… [listened] to my two and a half year old yell from his bedroom in both in joy and despair for two hours in an attempt to not go to sleep while I sat in the living room trying to prepare tomorrow?s photo history lecture. ?I can definitely relate to finding it difficult to focus. ?When Oliver is talking-whether in the same room or not-I find it extremely hard to concentrate on anything else. Having a child and an art career, and teaching is a lot to juggle. ?I always wonder and ask other women how they do it. The most helpful response was from a photographer that I greatly admire who said ?sometimes you are a not-so-great artist, sometimes a not-so-great mother, and sometimes a not-so-great teacher.? ?Hearing that made me feel not so bad about being not so great all the time at everything I was trying to do. Since grad school I made the decision to define success as continuously moving forward in some way, even if very slowly. And while I continue to ask artists with children how they do it, always hoping for some bit of wisdom that will make doing it easier, I realize that I am doing it too. ?For me, finding some balance (though that word makes life seem a little more stress-free than it is) happened when my son started going to day care two days a week and I had those days as studio days. ?I could focus on my work those days, teach a few mornings and be genuinely present when I was with him.
How I long to be fully present with L when I’m with him. It’s been a struggle of late, my desire for a job I don’t have to take home–but is still as fulfilling as working with students–so that on the days it’s Mama and L we’re really with one another, and I’m not worrying over whether I said the right thing to my student or what we’re doing in class next time or whether I’ll have time to finish up progress grades and lesson plan while L naps (or doesn’t). I am practicing detachment, but most days it doesn’t work that well. I found it really comforting to hear from someone else about trying to lesson plan while your kid refuses to nap (you all know I have blogged about this very phenomenon before). Childcare is such a blessing. L has been napping at Lorena’s very faithfully, and when I pick him up, he is happy and healthy. Repeat: this is such a blessing. Balancing it all is still a challenge, though, and I’ve been very busy and pretty stressed out the last 48 hours. Sometimes it occurs to me that life will always, always be like this, and that even an office job would leave me with angst to ball up and take home. Teaching, writing, and child-rearing seem both perfectly suited to one another and extremely conducive to burn-out.
I didn’t intend to write today so I will leave this here and now. More soon, comrades.
?
About Me
I'm working from the premise that motherhood is not just all diapers, tantrums, and setting limits. It's interesting. Okay, sometimes.
I'm working from the premise that motherhood is not just all diapers, tantrums, and setting limits. It's interesting. Okay, sometimes. 