It’s October 1, folks, which means I am officially into my third month of maternity leave (it unexpectedly started July 27, a week early). August was a haze; September was a mad rush of a short vacation, family visits, and Fixing Up the Apartment. Halfway through September I decided to extend my maternity leave a month, so I’m returned November 30. I can’t believe I have EIGHT more weeks at home; it seems impossible. Mostly because, I’m embarrassed to admit, I’ve gotten a little bored with the whole thing.
Engaging in idle activity
It’s not that I don’t love being at home with her, or that I don’t know I’d be wiped out after eight hours of office work on six hours of sleep. It’s just that she’s sleeping a bit more steadily now, and I no longer believe that closing my eyes will immediately bring on crib death, so in all, even with the pumping and the feeding, I’m actually getting a full eight-to-nine hours’ sleep at night, and no longer require a mid-morning and mid-afternoon nap to be a functional human being. Her signals are more predictable, as far as “needs sleep” or “needs food” goes, so I’m no longer wallowing in a pit of self-doubt all day, every day. And RocketMan is home all day with me, ramping up for his new position as stay-at-home dad, so I’m not flying solo. (Case in point: he does the laundry.)
What all this adds up to is an increasing sense of guilt (I was raised Catholic, so everything results in guilt). I could be writing. I could be exercising. I could even be back at work. But instead, I’m sitting at a computer, my baby sleeping in the other room, reading the Julie/Julia Project blog, checking Facebook, and picking out artwork for the nursery.
But the truth is, doing those things actually isn’t as easy as I keep telling myself. Writing, for instance— I love our apartment, but since the only doors are to the bathroom and the bedroom, and we don’t own a laptop, the requisite silence writing requires is noticeably lacking, along with the promise of at least 30 interruption-free minutes. Exercising, well, yes, I could surely do that, except, again, 40 interruption-free minutes are hard to come by at the moment; I could go to Pilates at a studio or to the Y (where I hope my bathing suit is still hanging in the locker room; it’s been there since July 25, when last I visited), but then I feel guilty about taking a precious two baby-free hours out of the middle of the day for my own vanity, leaving RocketMan to fend for himself. And going back to work well, I can’t kid myself: my sleeping patterns are better than before, but not good enough to function as an intelligent human being just yet.
I know I need to treasure this down time; when I return to work and have ten less hours in the day, I’m going to be wiped out and longing for these idle periods. So I’m finding myself trying to do stuff, some of it even crafty. I covered a shelf in the nursery with contact paper yesterday. I picked out some artwork for the nursery, as well, which now has to be matted and hung. I made a pepperoni roll yesterday, too, and today I’m tackling a chicken breast recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking (yes, inspired by Ms. Julie). But even that recipe’s making me feel bad, because there’ll be a solid hour or so—during the height of the Agent of Chaos’ fussy time— wherein I’ll be turning buttered chicken and stirring a cream sauce. I’m learning a fundamental rule of motherhood: all tasks must be interrupt-able, because you will be interrupted. Currently, my days fall into two categories:
- Active activity: Washing dishes, cooking, changing diapers, whispering “Pleasestopscreaming”
- Idle activity: Holding the baby, breastfeeding, or pumping; in other words, it should be multi-taskable, like I can write while the breastpump churns away, or cook while holding the baby, but actually isn’t.
It’s the idle activity periods that have me wondering if I was wrong in taking an extra month. Having two of us here increases my sense of guilt about not working, not writing, not exercising, not doing All the Things I Should Do. Then, after all the guilt spiral and the questioning myself and going cross-eyed for knowing who won the Relly Award for Best Real Person on Live! With Regis and Kelly, I remember I just spent nine months incubating a human being, the last three months of which I dealt with excruciating, radiant sciatic pain and didn’t have the energy to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, followed up by a week spent in the hospital, wondering if said human being was going to breathe off a ventilator or not.
Yes, ma’am, I’ve earned the right to a little idle activity. Wait, gotta go. Agent of Chaos just woke up. Time for some Active Activity.
