Shortly after my first child was born, when I was on a
six-month maternity leave, I realized that the most compelling reason for
returning to work was to get a break.
The pressures of a newborn baby plus the "help" and
"support" coming from so many corners made me realize that working
ten-hour days for people who didn't appreciate me actually wasn't as hellish as
I had thought. There was no inconsolable
crying at work, no worrying about mysterious bodily fluids, no hyperventilating
family members demanding that I call the pediatrician, no dogs eating the food
left on the counter for two unwatched seconds.
Even better, I could close my office door and take a nap on the floor
under my desk in perfect peace and quiet.
As attractive as all this was, I realized it was a lousy reason to leave
my precious baby in the care of a virtual stranger who might be a religious nut
or a child-abuser (or both).
So I did the responsible thing and quit my job. What followed was two decades of trying to
accomplish many things and only occasionally succeeding. My first goal was to take a daily
shower. Sounds easy, except the minute I
turned on the water, the baby would start screaming or the dog would start
barking and then the baby would start crying, or the phone would ring and it
would be my husband asking me to do something that required complicated
logistics given said baby and dog. It
humiliates me to admit that there were many days during my baby's early months
when a shower did not happen.
Eventually, my husband and I succeeded in setting a fixed
bedtime for our daughter -- 8:00 pm -- and that was when we would eat dinner
and I would have a shower for dessert. We drove
our teenaged babysitters crazy with our bedtime routine but most of them had
heard we paid well if the baby was asleep when we came home. The bedtime ritual had given us back some
portion of our pre-baby lives and we adhered to it with the precision of a
German train schedule. Daytime hours,
unfortunately, never fell in line with any sort of routine.
My husband left the house at around 8:00 each morning and
returned sometime after 7:00 in the evening.
My days consisted of breastfeeding, making coffee, changing diapers,
dressing the baby, feeding the dog, doing a load of laundry, bundling the baby into her outerwear and
strapping her into her stroller, walking the dog, changing the baby,
re-bundling her, going to the grocery store, the bakery, the gourmet deli, the
dry cleaners, and returning home for more breastfeeding and a late lunch. After running around all morning, the baby
was supposed to take a nap, but she was a light sleeper and every ring of the
phone or bark of the dog would wake her so eventually I gave up on that idea,
being grateful for the eight hours of sleep she granted us at night.
The lack of nap meant that the baby was often fussy in the afternoons and that
meant putting her in the Snugli while I chopped vegetables and marinated the
chicken. This worked great for about
four days until she got bored with the inside of the Snugli and started
screaming the minute I strapped it on.
So I tried the backpack. It was awkward to get into with the baby inside and I almost dropped her on her head. My next brainstorm was to put
her in a baby rocker on the counter top.
In between chops I would rock the chair or tickle her tummy or otherwise
distract her. In this way, I managed to
prepare a nice dinner for my husband across a four or five hour time period.
Just when I breathed a sigh of relief that all I had left was to throw everything into a saute pan and boil water for rice, invariably the phone would
ring; while I looked away for five seconds to find the phone, the dog would
help himself to everything on the kitchen counter. I knew that St. Francis was testing me, so I let the dog live. The call that enabled the dog to clear the counters was usually my husband saying he was coming
home and hoping that dinner would be ready. I explained that
his call had cost him his dinner and would he please stop at the Indian
carryout and bring home some butter chicken and saag paneer and naan?
Most of my friends in those days were the nannies of
neighboring children because the other mothers had the good sense to fork over
their paychecks to high school graduates and foreigners so they wouldn't have to deal with the diapers and dogs and disappearing dinners. Those mothers have no idea what they missed.
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