I thought I had a choice and I really did in the sense that I did not need to work. We didn't need me to work for the money, though more money is usually nice. I dreamed of being a mom for so many years. In my 20's I would hang out with my friends who were moms and sit and chat with them as their child played in the sand and I would quickly think No way. Not for me. I will want to keep working. Wait, back up. For years before that I assumed I would work and have kids because I wanted both and it seemed like if I wanted both I could have both. But the more grown-up I became the more the math made less sense. And not so much the money-making math but the time-having math. How exactly would it work to have a job and a baby? I mean, they both seemed to require so much time. And by so much I mean. . .all of the time. I felt a little let-down.
I like working. I've almost always liked working. Up there I wrote out "have a career" as the thing I wanted and then backed up to delete it because, though I wondered and compared myself against the careers I was aware of, mentally holding them up against me like dresses trying to see which one might fit me, I don't think I felt strongly that I wanted to be an X like I thought I needed to be a mother. Jobs I've liked have been ones that made me think on my feet, make decisions quickly. Jobs where working hard made a difference and I could see results. Jobs where I interacted with other people. Hostessing, organ placement, Lawyer Referral where I answered phone calls in Spanish and English and talked to people about why they thought they needed lawyers. Even being the Assistant to the Director of Latin American Sales for a company selling heavy-duty diesel parts. I was often bored and surfing the newly-discovered internet though that mostly meant Craigslist and emailing my college roommates, I liked the parts where I was translating Spanish/English or Sales/Engineering. Liked helping people make the connection.
In that job, my first real job after graduating college, I spent a lot of time folded into my cubicle which faced no one and where no one but my boss, who was often travelling, could see me. I could hear the sales calls and the racist comments some of my co-workers made on the other sides of our walls but those felt less like co-workers than weird tent-city neighbors. I was in my own world unless I was on the phone or meeting with Jorge or sitting in the office of the HR Director-turned-friend Michele. She and I spent hours talking which in some ways I thought was weird but in some ways I now see as tangentially at least in the realm of her job. But not really. We talked about a lot of different things, including romantic relationships and by that I mean specifically mine at the time with my live in boyfriend and her marriage. She didn't disclose secrets of her marriage to me, nor would I have wanted to hear them, but she sometimes told me things like the fact that she, or he, always left the cabinet doors wide open and that he, or she, always got annoyed about having to close them but that figuring out how to deal with that type of thing was what long-term relationships were all about. I bring her up because she said at least three things to me that have stuck in my mind like rubber cement:
Don't feel guilty if you quit this job. Do you think they would feel guilty if they fired you? It's business. They would go on without you without a second's thought.
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It's good for you to be working and be in school because under the glaring light of your attention your boyfriend will wilt like a flower in the blazing sun.
And then after my transplant:
If you are ever in the position of having to choose between having health insurance and buying groceries, your friends will feed you. Don't ever let your coverage lapse. (because in the land before Obamacare if I fell off my group plan for even a minute I would be booted off those in a heartbeat due to how insanely expensive I am to insurers)
I always knew I wanted to stay home with my kids before I even thought much about stay at home mom vs working mom. It was less about what I thought would be best for the kids and more about my own desire to be with my imaginary kids. To learn from them and to learn about myself with them. Aside from loving small children and loving to teach I imagined that being a mom would be the ultimate combination of being indispensable (why didn't I think that part through more?), illustrative and self-aware by nature of being in a new and unreproducable life experiences, Being most-loved seemed nice too. I was always the one who could soothe a baby, get her to smile and coo. I had my ways and babies always relaxed into me. But they also always lit up like the sun at the sight of their mothers and I wanted that. I wanted to know what that felt like. Plus I was already thinking a lot about what it meant to be a person and I wondered how that would look as the parent of growing, developing minds and hearts.
What I never thought about was that it might not be a choice for me. Yes, I could stay home and raise them but I would not be well. My mind would be going, going, going, churning, burning me up and I wouldn't be able to stop it. It's a lie to say I never thought about it because how could I not? I knew my propensity for self-analysis. I knew my mind. My cyclical moods, full of energy and hope sometimes, unwilling to get up from the couch, wondering why I ever thought anything was a good idea other times.
When I went back to work part-time, I felt better. For lots of reasons--getting dressed up and thinking about what to wear, taking the train into the city and getting to absorb the people around me or getting to read many pages of something, walking around the city, being noticed and cared for like having someone hold an elevator door for me. Sitting across from my old doctor turned friend and now colleague to brainstorm the program we were building. Having successes. It felt good but more than that it relaxed me. It took me out of my mom-self and gave me some of my old, cherished but until now underappreciated identity. Because while I knew I liked working, I didn't know I needed it to be ok. To be sane. Is that an overstatement? I don't think it is.
This blog was born during that full-time mothering period of my life and it has suffered since I went back to work. Before it was a challenge to find the time but the words burned their way out of me because they had no where else to go. I mean, I talked to my friends or with groups of women in my yoga studio and I had moments of release but the writing was the result of the constant thinking, thinking, thinking that was going on as I took care of my kids. Strapped them into carseats which is its own marathon activity to the point that I still plan my day and spontaneous stops based on how many times I'm willing to take them out and put them back into the car. It's hard to appreciate the physical and mental toll waged by the maneuvering of semi-compliant limbs of others as you bend and squeeze and turn them into their car seats.
Yesterday as a work day was notable for the fact that two separate colleagues told me without being asked that I am so hard on myself. I didn't feel like I was being hard on myself, though that is the single-most common descriptive comment I hear from others. It gave me pause because I hate hearing it and because when I held it up against myself I didn't feel like it fit. At least not then. Which then made me think harder to try to figure out why my self-awareness can be so off in that particular area. How do I get better at that? Do I try? You see where I'm going with this? This is how I tend to think, no matter what. So with small children and few other outlets or inputs it was a whirling, swirl of a mess.
What does it mean when working is your self-care? Because work is not self-care. It's medicine. Draining, difficult medicine that takes up a lot of time from the things I'd often rather be doing. Things which when I wasn't working I never did. Like cook or garden or write or do yoga. I mean, I don't do any of those things on a day I'm with the kids.
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