Clementine is sleeping and I know I should be making use of this time to call some more daycare providers to see if any of them have openings for infants, much less if I like them. Everyone was urging me to start this process before she was even born, but I kept putting it off. Denial is a powerful tool in my hands and I'm happily wielding it now as I try to figure out what my next move should be.
I had no idea I would feel this conflicted about daycare, and it's throwing my whole sense of mothering and working out of whack. Before I actually had a kid, I knew hands down that I would always be a working mom--it just seemed like the normal, inevitable, even logical thing to do. Now that I have Clementine and have watched her develop over the last two months, I'm starting to see how very important every single second is. She changes with almost every experience we have (not every second, of course, but certainly daily), and I hate to trust that time to anyone else. To be honest, it's not only about trust--why should anyone but me or Nate get the best part of her days during a time in her life when she is becoming who she will be forever? Moreover, why should a job get the best part of my day or Nate's? What do we have left for each other come 5 o'clock--a few hours before bed where we can scramble to spend time with one another, clean the house, do laundry, cook, be social and have a life? Let's not even factor into it the things Nate and I do for ourselves creatively--write, make art, work in the garage, work on the house.
And about my job. I'm not a career woman in my head, but here I've ended up with a career. Truth be told, I don't much care about my job when I'm not there, but I have this overwhelming work ethic when I am and I get sucked in. It's like when I am around a football game or a baseball game or something; normally, I wouldn't care and would certainly never seek out the opportunity to watch them, but when I'm in front of one, I can cheer with the best of them feel like something DEPENDS on the outcome. It's the same with work--the job could evaporate tomorrow and my sense of myself wouldn't change at all. Nevertheless, when I'm given an assignment or a job I can't help but do it and do it right. Even before I got pregnant, though, I was looking around and wondering how I got to this place that is as far away from what I imagined of my life as possible. I was starting to feel bitter about the whole wake, work, eat, sleep, wake, work cycle that consumed me Monday through Friday. I used to be a poet--where did that go? I thought leaving academia behind would help me find a real world connection to poetry, but instead I got lost in the corporate universe. It's not so bad when I'm in the thick of it, but with a little perspective it feels...well...it feels like something I want no part of. Having a kid has really redefined the importance of work for me.
But that doesn't mean I'm ready to just chuck it and stay at home. There's a frightening look in the eyes of some of the stay-at-home moms I see in Target as they wander through the aisles. Their lives are their children, which is a wonderful notion but doesn't leave them much of their own stuff. I don't want that either. I want to have something, some kind of work, but I want to have time and flexibility, too. I see the temptation to hole up inside motherhood and insulate myself from the world and its responsibilities--I don't want that. I don't want to use this as an excuse to withdraw. I just want to find a balance between putting my kid first and having a life, a job, something to do.
What I'm skirting, of course, is my desire to get back to writing. I never really gave it a shot when I fled academia to try and make it work in the real world. It's not like I think poetry is a career or anything, but freelance writing is. I used to make sense of the world through writing, and I think the fact that I've lost that connection explains a lot about how traditional some aspects of my life have become. I've stopped questioning, stopped being instrospective and am just taking that broad, paved, unmistakable and easy path through the world.
So, how do I balance all of this and what do I ultimately do about daycare? There is so much guilt on both sides of the issue--I'd feel guilty leaving Clementine and I'd feel guilty stepping out of the workforce all together and depending on Nate to help us survive. This sucks. But avoidance helps. Writing this instead of calling daycare providers is so much more enjoyable, even if it leads to a serious responsibility hangover later.
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