Claiming Stay-at-Home-Momhood

I went to my therapist a few weeks ago for a check in. I had scheduled the appointment after my emergency session following my termination thinking I would need additional tuning up a few weeks later. Turns out I had managed to emerge from the hole relatively well and was in less acute crisis.

One thing came out of our conversation that I think is worth sharing.

I called myself a Stay at Home Mom for the first time.

In our country, being a Stay at Home Mom is a wildly polarizing thing. Women write whole treatises defending their Stay at Home Momness. They describe how tough of a job it is, how thankless it is, how people assume they sit all day at home watching TV and have no fucking clue what happens in the day-to-day life of raising children. And all of that is true.

Unless you are a mother, you do not understand the profound loneliness of motherhood. You have a little person with you all day, but you never have a real conversation, never get to be fully who you are, and are constantly keeping tabs on this other being to the point that even when you are asleep and they are asleep you sort of have one eye open waiting for a cry to tell you to spring into action.

I quit being a stage manager largely because of this constant vigilance. You have to be on always and even in the moments of down time, you are not truly down. You’re always at a low hum. Mothers are exhausted because of how they are always having to monitor, run a program in the background, taking up CPU and RAM. I call it the iMommy app refreshing in the background.

One thing I can say with confidence is that when I go to work, I don’t have this program running in the background. When my baby is with my in-laws or my husband, iMommy turns off and I feel palpable relief at not having to track Ronan.

Work for me is about 9 hours a week over Wednesday-Friday while he’s at Grandparent Daycare.

As a Stay at Home Mom, I am always tracking him, always monitoring his mood, his reactions, his feelings, his hunger, his diaper, his everything. Everything. I am the subject matter expert on my son and he is a constant equation of input (food, stimulation, sleep) and output (poop, temperament, health). I know all if it always and adjust the equation every day to fine tune how to keep his output as pleasant and palatable to the rest of the world as possible.

Some people have a predisposition to doing this well and with relatively low impact on their CPU and RAM. I do not have this predisposition. Or maybe I did at some point, but it was used up when I had to track the mood/temperament/input/output of my parents and their own pathology. So not only do I not particularly like this constant tracking, but it’s also a little psychologically triggering for certain parts of me.

I resisted the title of Stay at Home Mom until this point because, in our country, these women are patronized in the worst way. On a thread about equal pay for equal work, a man went off on a tangent to explain how being a mom is The Most Important Job in the World. It’s a common refrain I hear from women defending their Stay at Home Momness or from men or women trying make Stay at Home Moms feel better about staying at home.

Parenting is viewed as inherently feminine work. It’s something that is undervalued as evidenced by the fact that we don’t have standard paid parental leave and women take financial and career hits when we have families.

Of course, I also keep hearing we “choose” this, as if for everyone it is an option. For our family, we can’t afford traditional daycare or a nanny with my business still in the early phases of growing. So I stay with our son instead of paying for daycare. You can be damn sure if I could afford daycare he would be there. I don’t believe in the nonsense about how daycare is outsourcing parenting or any other ridiculous reason people cite for why children should not be in daycare. Fuck that. As if working parents need another reason to be shamed for their choices.

And again, as if it’s a choice! Parents who work mostly do it because they HAVE to. But also, so what if they want to? I love to work. If I could have Andy and I work part or three-quarter time we would do it in an instant. But that’s not how the world, and particularly the theatre world, works.

So saying I’m a Stay at Home Mom felt big because I was taking on all the crap that people throw at women who are staying home with their children. The stereotypes include that I’m lazy and poor and have no skills I can work with and, thus, will have to join the legions of women who rigorously defend themselves about staying home.

And.

This one feels the biggest.

Am I living up to my full potential?

My mother was a flipping rocket scientist at NASA and worked in the male dominated field of software engineering. With a legacy like that, how can I stay home and not take advantage of the work she did to pave that pathway for me?

I know my mom would never agree with this assessment. She would say that being a parent was the best part of her life and that working was a means to the end of providing for her children.

But as the end of that, it feels like I am too smart, too resourceful, too sensitive, too educated to let my Master’s degree collect dust while I plan naps and make baby food and take walks and clean up poopy diapers and do a lot of laundry.

Which is why I was resistant to claiming the role I’m already living.

I recognize that I am part of a newer type of woman. The one who is a work from home/stay at home mom. Some of us are part of those Multi-level Marketing companies that sell you essential oils and shakes and supplements. Some of us are professionals like lawyers, accountants, and consultants.

I think that being a stay at home/work from home mom is no more or less crazy-making than any other type of mothering. Of course, I will never live another lifetime like this and therefore have no way to compare it to something else. All moms are struggling in whatever their circumstances are. I am grateful that my circumstances mean I get to wear yoga pants more often than not, but I wish it didn’t come with societal stigma that tells me I should be grateful. But, as I have learned, all moms are told they should be grateful, regardless of their level of satisfaction with their circumstances. Which is a topic for another day.

Failing Baby Calculus?

I met with my doula today for a book return and quick check in.

Kim came into our lives quickly and fortuitously after we learned that my pregnancy had gone from low to high risk. I was going to be induced early due to gestational hypertension and we knew we would want someone to help us navigate the new world of medical interventions and all the new decisions we would have to make.

We hired her mid-June, went on a babymoon, and returned to an immediate hospitalization and subsequent delivery. It was almost divine in the timing. Initially we weren’t going to hire a doula, but with all the new problems we were encountering, having someone act as a sounding board and medical advocate became vitally important to us.

Kim asks incredible questions and has a whole demeanor that allows for immediate, open conversation. 5 minutes into our conversation I dove deeply into the world of my new paradigm as a parent and explained to her the difficulty of managing the new level of fatigue.

Fatigue isn’t just coming from the obvious source of a lack of sleep. What we don’t really talk about is the fact that our brain is rewiring as parents. Kim constantly reminded me of this in the early days with Ronan and it’s a piece of information I pass on to other new moms. In my work in organizational change management, brain rewiring, both on the personal and organizational level, is the centerpiece of what I am trying to do. In order to successfully rewire brains there needs to be a constant source of energy (glucose), a regular cycle of stress (the change we’re making), and rest.

In parenting, there are several barriers to quick rewiring. First, there is the obvious lack of sleep and downtime to facilitate rest. I type this as my son is napping, but if I weren’t I’d likely be doing dishes, laundry, responding to emails, or planning any of the 10,000 things that go into running a household and business. Even this is not rest. Rest involves a lack of stimulus like sleeping or meditating. Even watching TV or reading, activities commonly associated with relaxing, involve external stimulus that keeps our brains from truly resting.

When we rewire the human brain we need LOTS of rest. Children are the most concrete example of brain rewiring. Part of the reason why they sleep so much is because of all the new neural connections being built and reinforced through reviewing memories.

Though we new parents are doing some serious rewiring, the main source of fatigue comes from what I call Baby Calculus. This is the constant flow of tiny decisions parents have to make every day. There is well-documented evidence of decision fatigue, which is the feeling of exhaustion we get from making many small decisions during the day. Decisions in non-parental life can start first thing in the morning with what to wear. President Obama famously reduces his chance for decision fatigue by only wearing blue or gray suits. As the day goes on, we draw on more and more glucose stores in our brain as we decide how to respond to texts or emails, whether or not to go to the gym, what to have for lunch, to get water now or after the meeting, how to order our coffee today, etc.

For parents, not only do we make these decisions for ourselves, but we also make them for our tiny human. My most vivid example was just after Andy had gone back to work and I was trying to get Ronan down for a nap. We had just gotten a swing from a friend and we were heavily relying on it to soothe him during the day. But we discovered that sometimes if we left the swing on after he had fallen asleep, the movement would actually wake him up. So we had taken to turning it off after 10 minutes. But then in the last day, the lack of movement was causing him to wake up. So you can see the dilemma. Do I turn off the swing or leave it on? My baby needs a nap, but there’s a 50/50 chance that whatever I do will wake him up and could have to start the process of soothing him to sleep all over again.

This is just one of many, many decisions that get made in the course of caring for a newborn. Do I go on a walk while he’s awake or asleep? Should I put him down for a nap now or later? In 3 minutes? 5 minutes? Will this catnap affect his night sleep? Should I let him try and soothe himself back to sleep or go in and offer a bottle or paci? Was that a cry that needs immediate attention or his just making noise in his sleep like babies do?

Add to that all the decisions I have to make for myself during the day and no wonder new parents rely on food that’s easy to make and skip the gym.

Ronan is 3 1/2 months old now and just starting to show some regularity in his routine. This is akin to finding a way to automate email responses or meal planning. As his routine and needs become more regular and recognizable, the number of decisions I have to make in a day will start to decrease and hopefully give me some brain space back for eating a salad and returning to the consulting work I love so much.

Though it’s more likely that, because he’s a human, he’ll start to shift the minute I find some regularity. It’s ok, though, because my brain is rewiring, too, and starting to get better and figuring out what my tiny human needs.