I’ve had consistent childcare for three weeks now. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, three days a week, my mom comes from 11-5. That’s six hours. Six hours interspersed with still nursing the baby and putting him down for naps, so more like 4.5 hours all told. I close a door in my house and sit myself behind it, to do my work.
I can’t remember what my work is supposed to be. Which is ridiculous because just a few months ago it was a compelling, propelling, full-time-job, with another very compelling side hustle of writing things on spec and trying to get them published. I had been working more than 40 hours a week, and happily. I was churning out poetry manuscripts, essays, sewing patterns, customer emails, side-projects, drawings, a full blown handmade wardrobe. Now, I have 13.5 hours a week in which to fit all my work, plus the odd nap if you count that (which I don’t).
There are a couple of problems here.
This is not enough time to fit full time work into. It’s barely enough time to fit part time work into.
I find it very difficult to stop and start my work so much, and to be so frequently interrupted.
When I’m with the baby, I find it nearly impossible to multitask beyond listening to podcasts in one ear with my airpods.
I still feel that propulsion to work sometimes, but it’s coming much more from things that I 100% don’t need to do (like furiously drafting a strange postpartum autofiction novel), than things I 100% need to do (like run my business that actually makes me money.)
The strangest sensation I’m feeling is a desire to be washed totally clean of all the former details of my life. I want a new house, new job, new clothes, new everything. I can look at it with a literary mind and see that the baby has changed my life so completely that I want everything else to reflect that change too — but how visceral this desire feels is startling to me. I sort of just want to disappear. To go down under the water with my baby and not come up. To answer to no one, to be very quiet, very still, motionless.
I can’t actually do that, and don’t actually want that (as evidenced extremely directly by the fact that I’m voluntarily writing a newsletter to send to strangers + friends at this moment!) but it’s interesting to me how often that image comes up. And the desire feels most vivid in my work. I keep asking myself — “do I want to work?” Yes, and no.
I feel a sort of panic when I have childcare and I’m supposed to be working. Like I’m in a spotlight on a stage. Like I forget all of my lines. Like I want to go back to my dressing room and cry.
I think having my baby cracked me open, covered me in vulnerability like skin, made me want the good life more desperately than ever before. In the good life, I think I have work to do. But, in the good life that work does not depend on making money, making tidy business decisions, or keeping certain hours. In the good life, work is adjacent to rest, not at odds with it. In the good life, I have childcare that isn’t about me working but instead about keeping a sort of spaciousness and solitude. The sort of spaciousness that work can bubble up out of. The sort of open water that makes you want to swim again.
Capitalism has eaten other people alive much more than it’s eaten away at me — I’ll own that. I’ve had it good, have had a much closer approximation of this fleeting imaginary the good life than so many others would say they’ve had. But still, still. There’s something about caring for a baby who only, deeply, truly wants your time, your unending time, that makes you not want to exchange that time for money anymore.
I got really good work news last week, the realization of a goal I made years ago that felt completely foolish to make. An impossible dream! The sort of thing I should have been popping champagne for, reveling in, savoring. Instead, my first though after the initial satisfaction was panic about childcare, about the time — how will I deal with my baby while I accomplish this big thing? Thinking about the hours I’d be spending working, and how those would be hours not spent with my baby. Back to that all too familiar face off — mother vs. art monster (have you read and reread Dept. of Speculation yet?). When I am working I am in a room with the doors shut, my baby who craves my time will not be given it. My time will be given to the marketplace instead.
How do I feel about that?
Reader, confused!!!
It’s not that I don’t want to work, it’s that I want to be able to do both! Perfectly, effortlessly, satisfyingly! I want to mother and work, both with abandon, both perfectly! Now that’s the impossible dream, much more than any goal for what deals could be made, what projects taken on, or what benchmarks could be reached. I want to be the perfect mother and the perfect artist, and instead I feel insufficient in every category, so, so tired, so afraid.
Sometimes when I’m behind my door working and I hear my kid’s little voice babbling, making the music of language before he even knows it means something, I want to whip open the doors and go to him, cover him in endless attention, endless time.
But sometimes when I’m with my kid, when the day stretches out ahead of us and there’s nowhere we need to go, nothing we need to do, just him and me together, alone, that endless time — I feel like I might die if I can’t read or write right that moment, if I can’t go behind that same door and be by myself with my mind. If I can’t make some moves, make some money, feel big in the world, not small.
I have become the sort of obscure paradox I’ve always tried to categorize myself out of. What I want is so at-odds that I feel like some weird double-creature, like a centaur, half horse half person. I want to gallop! I want to think!
This will not be solved in a day. My desire for perfection gets its legs swept out from under it hourly it seems. Perfect balance, perfect perspective isn’t actually the goal. It’s so clear to me how ridiculous, how unobtainable to everyone everywhere that is — any illusion that it’s different is a lie. My goal is living. My goal is quite simply the good life, whatever that may be. My goal is to use the time that I have either behind the door or in front of it fully and wisely, to give myself space to be inefficient, to feel whatever I feel and allow my whole life to devastatingly change.
Childcare as a gift and a curse all at once. Gathering complexity like gathering clouds, maybe all this weather will begin to seem beautiful to me.