Incrementally Speaking

Gaining mobility, losing hair

So, I've either realized something very, very profound, or I'm the last one to board the short bus in terms of understanding what makes stay-at-home motherhood so exhausting.  It's that there aren't any weekends.  Ta da!

I recognize that working outside the home is obviously tiring in its own right, but I remember that even when I had stacks and stacks of papers to grade, essay questions to write, lesson plans to make and e-mails to respond to on the weekends, at least they were two days that were different from the rest of the week.  As God intended. 

Now, don't get me wrong.  Weekends are still pretty great.  Ben is around and often lets me have an hour or two extra in bed in the mornings.  He makes nice breakfasts.  We do fun stuff.  Or: we do the same stuff I do during the week, but we do it together, which makes it feel like fun.  We see family.  I get to take a load off more and sometimes even leave the house for extended babyless periods to have brunch with friends.  But weekends are really just variations on a theme, which gives a Groundhog Day quality to my life at present.

Motherhood appears to be very much about measuring time differently.  In the really early weeks, when Milo was a teeny baby and woke up all the time to eat and cry and he couldn't sleep more than an hour or two at a stretch, max, catching a forty-five minute nap felt sort of luxurious.  When he started waking up only two or three times a night, it felt like a victory.  And now, he's doing a great job of sleeping through the night; the kid even takes about three naps a day, although they vary in how substantial they are.  I mean, he is pretty much still wired to only be awake and alert for about two hours at a time, which means that a cycle of activities can happen and re-happen: diaper changing, feeding, playing on the floor gym, bouncing in the jumperoo, etc.  And each activity probably lasts for fifteen minutes, tops?  It reminds me of the character, Will, in Nick Hornby's novel, About a Boy, whose father wrote some stupid Christmas song, the proceeds from which have made him so indescribably wealthy that he has never had to work, yet he is so bored that he measures his days in half-hour increments.  

 

But so I always feel -- slightly less so on weekends, but, yes, even then -- like I'm waiting for a timer to go off, a timer that can often have a very jarring effect -- and I never know quite when it's going to sound.  And it's that waiting, knowing, anticipating -- one's ear always turned towards the baby monitor or waiting for the cute noise that turns into the feed me howl -- that can drive a person craaa-zy.