Attempting the impossible

In response to my good friend Lesley’s very valid comment question about how on earth I get any work done with the baby in tow, I’ve decided to do the post that I’ve wanted to write for a while.  I am, in fact, attempting the impossible for the next four months: working as close to full-time as possible while not putting the baby in day care.

(Edit: I wrote this really long, flowery, idealistic post below, but the short answer is that I work - poorly - while the baby sleeps.  So I also do everything in my power to help her sleep in long chunks, which is perhaps instilling bad sleep habits, which I will also probably pay for later.  And that's about it :))

Over the course of my world travels, I have always been inspired by the women in less industrialized societies than ours.  They truly bring their babies everywhere with them as they go about their daily business.  They simply strap the babies to their bodies in some kind of carrier and go, nursing whenever they need to (in societies that actually support breastfeeding, how novel!!).  The babies nap in the carrier when they’re tired, eat when they’re hungry, and life goes on quite normally.  Moms tend farms, run errands in town, cook food, carry water long distances, all with their babies - lots and lots of difficult tasks that they make look super easy.

Before I was even pregnant, I was intrigued by the thought of running this model for some non-trivial number of months after the baby was born, partially as a way to combat the paltry maternity leave here.  Forget scheduled naps and feedings and constantly trying to “get away” from the baby in order to do my stuff - maybe, just maybe, I thought I would be able to just bring her where I went and she’d be a “baby on the go” (edited to add: as it turns out, sometimes I ABSOLUTELY have to get away from the baby to get something important done - then she goes to husband :)).  My baby, too, would sleep when she was tired and eat when she was hungry and accompany me on my *daily business.*  I watched one of my colleagues do her job with her baby for the first six months of her second baby’s life, and that inspired me even more!  My job as a non-teaching professor (of sorts) makes me lucky for two reasons: 1) during the summer months, there are basically no meetings/committees/responsibilities that preclude attendance with baby in tow, and 2) most of my work (analyzing data and writing manuscripts) is done on my computer, which is fairly quiet and stationary.  This, plus the fact that I have my own office, means that I basically can work for some part of every day on campus while the baby eats, naps, or is simply bounced on the yoga ball when she’s too fussy to play with me.  It took some practice to be able to type well while doing these activities, but I’m pretty good at it now - I can often get in about 6 hours of solid work per day.  Also, if there's a meeting that I simply *have* to attend, husband takes her for an hour or so - the beauty of both working in the same building, and of having a super child-involved husband!

It also took a fair amount of trial and error to find a model that worked for us.  The (maybe?) downside of my model is that the baby sleeps best and longest in my lap - and I let her, so that I can work guilt-free.  With this model of lap napping, she gives me a two hour nap in the morning and the same in the afternoon, which I combine with a little work before she gets up in the morning and after she goes to sleep at night (she seems - knock on wood - to be beyond her sleep regression and is back to being up only 3 times a night, which I can totally handle).  Am I as productive as I would be with no baby?  Absolutely not - but I am getting *some* stuff done, and that’s better than no stuff.  Will this work for the foreseeable future?  Possibly not - Maya could rebel at  any point in time and give up naps again and/or need more stimulation than she’s currently getting, which basically amounts to playing (or walking) with me during most of her waking, non-feeding hours - but with a limited diversity of activities.  Will it be a complete disaster when she does finally go to child care in the fall after she’s spent so much time with me, especially while sleeping?  Almost assuredly, although I do try to get her some naps during the week in other places - her crib, even the car sometimes when we have stuff we need to get to.  But this is how I’m getting work done now, and I figure I’ll deal with the rest as it comes.

I want to be clear here that it’s not very pretty.  The house is usually pretty cluttered, sometimes we just order pizza for delivery because no one managed to cook that evening, and I am certainly TIRED by the end of the day.  I drink too much coffee.  And I’m “behind” on work compared to where I want to be.  I often forget deodorant and the gray hairs are taking over my head.  If husband didn't do the dishes every night, life would be WAY worse.

This is not some sort of horrible “lean in” mantra (that shit makes me cringe in horror) - it’s actually just me doing nothing terribly well, just doing everything a little bit.  This is also not an indictment against all the working moms who do use child care in order to be much more productive than me - good on ya!  A good portion of me is actually pretty jealous of you.  However, this model is working ok for our particular family at this particular moment.  I like doing science, I like pondering over whatever recent analysis issues I’ve had and writing code in my head while I nurse in the middle of the night, even if I can’t write every paper I want to right now.  I like taking nature walks with husband and Maya on a random Friday morning just because the weather is good and we can.  All three of us are all fed, clean, and loved, even if the rest of life looks pretty messy :)

And so we’re rolling with it - well, until September when school starts again!  Then, day care it is.