Confessions of a worn-out Stay-at-home mom
I thought this should be its own post.
I have a space reserved at a daycare starting June 1. That means in two weeks my stint as a SAHM will be over. My feelings about this are really complex.
Spawn is getting to be more fun every day. I've heard repeatedly that maternity leave is all backwards. You're home while your baby is a milk-to-poop machine, then go back to work when they start to become their own person. There's definitely truth to that.
OTOH, being a SAHM has not gone as well for me as I expected it to. I thought I was going into this with a minimum of expectations, but I was convinced that I would take to baby care like a fish to water. Instead I've found it exhausting and stressful, and that's with Spawn sleeping for 10-11 hours at night almost every night since she was ~3 months old, something I understand to be nothing short of miraculous. I'm having a lot of trouble with the lack of schedule. I have a deep-set need to learn "the rules" of my situation. But Spawn is changing every day. Most routines turn upside down in a week or less. Even though I know intellectually that this is normal, emotionally I feel like I keep chasing, grasping, and losing the rhythm of childcare. I never know what to expect from each day. Often the surprises are good ones, like getting to see her roll over for the first time. But just as often they're bad ones, like both the nap strikes and the discovery that I desperately need the breaks I get while she naps to stay sane. Even on days where there are no surprises, I often find that my enthusiasm for caring for her runs about two hours shorter than the time she's awake.
The saddest part, perhaps, is that Spawn is such a sweet-tempered baby that it seems horribly ungrateful to complain at all. We take her to restaurants, have friends over, take her to friends' houses, and bring her to events at the game store without much trouble. If she'd been a more difficult baby (the acid reflux hell month of February now long behind us), I think I might have been committed by now. And that's with two days "off" to work -- and it's amusing that I really do think of my work days as "days off."
This has been a real adjustment of identity for me. In my fantasy life, I'd always taken a year off to care for a baby, and I only reluctantly planned to return to work this early because I love my job so much. I've heard so many stories of women who made aggressive plans to return to work only to end up quitting their jobs when they found themselves unable to part with their babies. I'd barely heard the opposite stories of women who planned to dedicate themselves to baby care and found themselves climbing the walls to get back to work. Now I'm both terribly nervous about handing Spawn over to daycare and guiltily looking forward to it.
I wonder why I was so sure I was made to be a SAHM. I think it's because my mother never stopped talking about how rewarding it was for her. She stayed home for 10 years until my younger brother was in first grade. I've been discovering for the last few years that I have just assumed that the things my mother loved are things that I would love too, at such a deep level that I wasn't aware I was making the assumptions at all.
I know that being a working mom is a totally legitimate life choice, and it doesn't mean I love or delight in my daughter any less. And intellectually I know she'll adjust to daycare just fine, though she'll probably start it off by getting a cold and screwing up her sleep schedule. But I'm definitely turning out to be a different person than I thought I was, and that's been surprisingly hard to accept.
At any rate, in two weeks my and Spawn's lives are going to change a lot. We'll see how that goes.
I have a space reserved at a daycare starting June 1. That means in two weeks my stint as a SAHM will be over. My feelings about this are really complex.
Spawn is getting to be more fun every day. I've heard repeatedly that maternity leave is all backwards. You're home while your baby is a milk-to-poop machine, then go back to work when they start to become their own person. There's definitely truth to that.
OTOH, being a SAHM has not gone as well for me as I expected it to. I thought I was going into this with a minimum of expectations, but I was convinced that I would take to baby care like a fish to water. Instead I've found it exhausting and stressful, and that's with Spawn sleeping for 10-11 hours at night almost every night since she was ~3 months old, something I understand to be nothing short of miraculous. I'm having a lot of trouble with the lack of schedule. I have a deep-set need to learn "the rules" of my situation. But Spawn is changing every day. Most routines turn upside down in a week or less. Even though I know intellectually that this is normal, emotionally I feel like I keep chasing, grasping, and losing the rhythm of childcare. I never know what to expect from each day. Often the surprises are good ones, like getting to see her roll over for the first time. But just as often they're bad ones, like both the nap strikes and the discovery that I desperately need the breaks I get while she naps to stay sane. Even on days where there are no surprises, I often find that my enthusiasm for caring for her runs about two hours shorter than the time she's awake.
The saddest part, perhaps, is that Spawn is such a sweet-tempered baby that it seems horribly ungrateful to complain at all. We take her to restaurants, have friends over, take her to friends' houses, and bring her to events at the game store without much trouble. If she'd been a more difficult baby (the acid reflux hell month of February now long behind us), I think I might have been committed by now. And that's with two days "off" to work -- and it's amusing that I really do think of my work days as "days off."
This has been a real adjustment of identity for me. In my fantasy life, I'd always taken a year off to care for a baby, and I only reluctantly planned to return to work this early because I love my job so much. I've heard so many stories of women who made aggressive plans to return to work only to end up quitting their jobs when they found themselves unable to part with their babies. I'd barely heard the opposite stories of women who planned to dedicate themselves to baby care and found themselves climbing the walls to get back to work. Now I'm both terribly nervous about handing Spawn over to daycare and guiltily looking forward to it.
I wonder why I was so sure I was made to be a SAHM. I think it's because my mother never stopped talking about how rewarding it was for her. She stayed home for 10 years until my younger brother was in first grade. I've been discovering for the last few years that I have just assumed that the things my mother loved are things that I would love too, at such a deep level that I wasn't aware I was making the assumptions at all.
I know that being a working mom is a totally legitimate life choice, and it doesn't mean I love or delight in my daughter any less. And intellectually I know she'll adjust to daycare just fine, though she'll probably start it off by getting a cold and screwing up her sleep schedule. But I'm definitely turning out to be a different person than I thought I was, and that's been surprisingly hard to accept.
At any rate, in two weeks my and Spawn's lives are going to change a lot. We'll see how that goes.