Here comes the little gopher, poking her head up from under the ground for the first time in over a month. Some of you are aware of the basic reasons for my absence, but even my closest and most regular correspondents haven’t heard from me for long enough that my email inbox is piled up with emails saying “Are you still alive? Please get in touch.”
Some explanation is in order. Jonah took a three-week staycation in August, which we devoted to exploring the possibility of making a transition along three axes: a move into a bigger house with a garden, part-time work for me, and baby-care for Apollo that would enable me to work. During the staycation, Jonah spent 4-5 hours a day caring for Apollo solo, which allowed me to do some writing, work on my resume, and consider what kind of work I might want to do. Seeing that Apollo was perfectly happy to spend these half-days away from me cemented my resolve to find a job that would allow me to work in my home office for 4-5 hours a day, while Apollo spent that time with another caring adult. I was certainly happier after spending four quality hours at my desk. The fact is that our long-term economic reality is not for only Jonah to do paying work and for me to be full time at home. I didn’t take out $100,000 in student loans to permanently shelf my professional life for motherhood. For better and for worse, Apollo’s mother also has a career. I imagine my balancing act like a see-saw, or perhaps just scales—heavier on the childcare when my child(ren)’s needs are greatest, and slowly adding more professional work as those needs change.
But as with so much else about child-raising, there are few obvious or formulaic answers to the question of what is best for babies and children. The staycation convinced me that we were ready to make a shift. I sent out my resume and was offered a job teaching international law at the Hague University. Teaching college students is truly a dream job for me, and my new colleagues were perfectly agreeable when I told them that, because I am balancing the return to work with mothering my toddler, I would do all course prep work from my home office and would come into campus for 2 or 3 half-days per week. (I was certainly cognizant of how lucky I was to have found a professional environment that did not ask me to pretend that I am not a mother.) We found a perfect new house with a garden right up the street. And then Jonah’s mother Carol said that she was between projects, and could therefore come over to help us with childcare through this transition.
Miraculous! But that doesn’t mean that any of this transition was easy. I had six weeks to prepare the syllabus for my first class, to introduce Apollo to being cared for by his grandmother while I work, and for us to move into our new home. Apollo has had visits with his grandmother every few months since his birth, but he’s never been cared for alone by anybody other than Jonah and me. Carol arrived in mid-October. After playing together as a group a great deal to show Apollo how trustworthy she is, I started to leave them alone for an hour or two to work. Apollo would start weeping and screaming as soon as he realized that I was leaving. This had never happened when I left him with Jonah, which reassured me that it wasn’t my absence per se to which he was reacting, but that he still needed to build trust with Carol. I tried to telepath my confidence that he was in safe and loving care as I smiled and waved bye-bye, but it was hard to smile cheerfully into his scarlet, tear-streaked face, as he twisted in Carol’s arms and reached for me.
He would basically cry the whole time I was gone. He would cry when I walked back through the door, and stop crying only when he was back in my arms with a nipple in his mouth. He would stay close to me after my return, need more attention, cry more easily. It’s hard to describe how drained I felt, how very little energy I had to prepare for teaching and participate in the move. The sound of your baby crying—it’s like a tap into your body and spirit, and your energy and cheer just flow out and leave you like a cooked noodle—a cranky and sad cooked noodle.
We took 10 days to transition into the new place, visiting it daily and moving things over before we finally slept there. He didn’t seem distressed with the loss of our old home or our arrival at the new one. But a month after Carol’s arrival, he was still weeping when I left him with her to go work. She would spend almost my entire absence (as much as 4-5 hours on the days when I went to the university) holding and carrying him, a testament to her love, not to mention her physical strength. It has often seemed to me, during this period, that Apollo is essentially doing a concentrated physical bonding with Carol before he can become comfortable with her the way that he is with us. He hasn’t seemed happy to be always in her arms, but he is even less happy if she puts him down, and so they spend all their time together in contact. And then, after my return, he does show her love (kisses) and affection, a little more each time. On some level, he seems to know what he’s doing—at least, he’s doing what he needs to do.
So things didn’t progress as I’d hoped they would, that after a week or so, Apollo would take his Oma’s hand and toddle to the playground, returning home for lunch and nap while his mum works in her study. Instead, I spent a month grabbing moments here and there while Apollo wept and refused to eat or drink. I did my best to patch together little pieces of time to prepare my class and do the things necessary to keep the household running. Apollo’s increased need for me when I wasn’t working meant that I had zero left over for anything other than my most urgent responsibilities. No blogging. No emails. No phone calls, particularly since we still have no internet and thus no phone at our new place. It’s like we’ve all just been in this transition cocoon, holding on and coping as best we can.
Then of course we all got sick. Bronchitis has been going around Rotterdam as the season shifts, and our house still hadn’t had a good clean since we moved in. Carol and I got sick the week before last, even Jonah has a cough, and then Apollo, of course Apollo, picked it up at the beginning of this last week, my first week of teaching. Runny nose, fever, coughing. He needed to be held constantly; he wanted to sleep in arms, and would wake up instantly if contact was broken. What a coincidence, right? Thursday was my first lecture, and, as it happened, the #1 sickest day that Apollo has ever had. He vomited and had diarrhea five times each that day.
But you know what: the lecture went great. I was ready; I loved it; I entered a new chapter of my professional life; I arrived at a long-cherished goal. And I was home by 12:30 and held Apollo the rest of the day. And you know what else? I think we both—nay, I think we all—crossed a bridge that day. The reins I’ve been holding so tightly for the last month, I feel that I can release a bit. I can do this job; I can balance this life; I can start to reintegrate all its elements: mothering, working, writing, cooking, cleaning, communicating with friends and family. And so another coincidence: the next day, I left Apollo with Carol for an hour to run an errand. When I walked in the door, he smiled at me instead of crying. Carol said that, for the first time, after I walked out the door he had looked at her, sighed, stopped crying, and got down to play.
So perhaps, here we are, on the other side of the transition we visualized during our August staycation. It’s not like all the hard parts are over, or that he won’t cry when I work on Monday. But I do still believe that these changes are what this family needs, and that they will ultimately be for the best for all of us. I haven’t felt so sure of that at every moment in the last month. Indeed, when I was offered this job, and realized that I was now committing to responsibilities that would separate me and Apollo for 20-25 hours a week, I asked myself, “What have you done?” But then I remembered how really fine Apollo was to be away from me for that amount of time in August, and how good it felt for me to work for those hours, and how all of our life could improve in the short and long term if I could do this work and if Apollo learned to trust caregivers other than Jonah and me. We’ve ended an era of mother-and-baby 24-7 unity. I don’t know whether it’s too soon or too late, whether this could have been avoided if we lived in a more “natural” extended-family unit or if it is more “natural” for mother and child to be Siamese twins until age 3, 4, or 5. These are our choices; this is the context for our choices. We try to listen to ourselves, and listen to our baby, and to do the best thing.
We also try to listen to any and all advice from anybody with experience and wisdom to share, in an effort to minimize the extent to which we’re reinventing the wheel here. So please, don’t hesitate to tell me what you think of this situation and how we could make it easier for baby Apollo. Thanks for checking back in despite the long silence of the last month.
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