In German, it is awkward to say “I’m looking forward to seeing you when you wake up.” Instead, what feels natural is to say Ich freue mich drauf, dass du aufwachst, which means “I’m looking forward to you waking up.”
Which is a partial lie. As a hybrid mother-writer-painter (I’m nicknaming myself, probably not originally, a “straddle-parent”), I am subject to the constant temptation of feeling that I am running out of time, that I don’t have enough child care, that I am not going to get anything meaningful done, either inside or outside the house (not the dishes; and not that painting commission, either). The running-out-of-time part of me is hoping, devoutly, that Lucy will sleep as long as possible; and this part of me groans inwardly when I hear her crowing Dadoo! FWA!! after only an hour and a half.
In her excellent epistolary memoir Great with Child, Beth Ann Fennelly writes of a study she read that examined, by survey, the self-satisfaction of three sets of mothers with two aspects of their performance: the quality of their work, and the quality of their mothering. The first group, mothers who were staying home full-time with their children, reported high satisfaction with themselves as mothers. The second group, mothers whose children were in full-time daycare, similarly reported high satisfaction with themselves as mothers, and also high satisfaction with themselves as workers. The third group, mothers whose children were in part-time or no childcare, and who were working from home, or working part-time, reported low satisfaction with themselves both as mothers and as workers. Fennelly’s interpretation of this study is that the part-time-working mothers are comparing themselves, as mothers, to the stay-at-home moms, and as workers, to the mothers working full-time with full-time child care; and of course they cannot be both at once. But they cannot bring themselves to give up either ideal, and so they fight constant feelings of failure and inadequacy.
I want to leave aside for the moment the question of the needs of children, and the ways in which professional childcare and/or a stay-at-home caregiving parent can or cannot successfully meet those needs. (Although, as an aside, the most interesting perspective on that debate that I have recently come across is the chapter “day care?” in Pamela Druckerman’s 2012 Bringing up Bébé. It points out two things. First is that there is a history of upper-middle-class prejudice against institutionalized daycare in the U.S., which is not founded entirely on facts (one-on-one nanny care can be as low quality as any institutional day care). Another is that, in France, the position of a crèche worker is highly sought-after and competitive, reasonably compensated, and requires specialized training; whereas in the U.S., childcare work is often considered unskilled, compensated poorly, and does not by law require any training at all. Druckerman concludes that these two factors combine to explain why even French mothers who are not working vie for crèche spots for their children, whereas American mothers who can afford to stay home tend to be skeptical of daycares.) But I said I wanted to leave aside the needs of children for the moment. I want to focus instead on the needs of parents, particularly parents who are (like me) considering slow-tracking their careers in order to spend significant time being involved in their children’s daytime lives; and most particularly ones who are (again like me) doing at least some of their work on a freelance basis, and possibly in their homes. (These parents still tend strongly to be mothers, and mothers are the ones with whom I have experience, and so I will speak largely from their perspective. But I suspect the psychological pressures that stay-at-home, part-time-working dads face have at least something in common with the ones I face. If you are such a dad or know one, I’d love to know what you think.)
We are a privileged group on several levels: we can afford not to work full-time; we do work that scales and will permit itself to be done part-time (my husband, for example, could not in this country hold a part-time version of his software development job); and if we are the freelance work-from-homers, we have work that can be done at flexible hours, in whatever location we choose. And yet, if the study Fennelly refers to is accurate, instead of feeling like the luckiest people alive, we spend hours of our days battling a chronic feeling of time-shortage, and struggle under the weight of feeling that we never do anything well. We (and by “we” I now mean myself, although you are welcome) struggle to be present when we are working (the horrible clock is ticking), or to be present when we are with our children (how long till the next period of sleep?). We struggle to count anything as enough—“real” stay-at-home moms would be doing craft projects or nature excursions with their two-year-olds; “real” writers would be getting paid/publishing books/having contact with the outside world. We frequently feel, simultaneously, that we need more time for whatever we are currently doing, if it is to be done well; and that we can’t bear to do it any longer because we are so distracted by the other thing. At worst, desire and guilt become so tangled up together that we lose track of what we even want to be doing, and muddle along in a haze of misery. And that’s just trying to balance child-raising and work; never mind housekeeping. Or friends. Or service to anyone outside our immediate family.
In spite of sacrificial levels of childcare from my mom, who is splitting her time between my brother and sister-in-law’s four kids and Jim’s and my one, I spent a stretch of this past fall in that kind of haze. A lot of that had to do with moving to a Portland, a city where I now know almost no one other than my family, even though I’ve spent years living there. Friends are medicine for the haze; they help me get perspective, and best of all, they build a shining mesh of connections that lights up my life and reminds me which things matter, and why. I have started to have a mesh in Oregon now; it grows awfully slowly, but it does grow if you let it. And it grows in the most unexpected places. The week Jim had to fly back to Durham for work and I was alone in the house, for example, I locked myself out. I was holding Lucy and had no phone. The sun was just setting. After walking around the house confirming that all the side and back doors were locked and the windows fastened shut, I headed over to our neighbors’ house. They have two daughters, one almost two, like Lucy, and one who, as it turned out when I knocked, had just that week celebrated her eighth birthday. I asked to borrow a phone to call my mom and ask whether she had any ideas for getting in (we had not yet given them spare keys, because the bag of spare keys had gone missing early in the move-in process). She was at my brother’s house and did have an idea (it involved her nephew, whom she hires for yardwork, and a two-story ladder). She drove over immediately, and once she got there, the unidentified key from my brother’s ring turned out to be to our house, and the nephew, who drove up shortly later, was sent home without a ladder adventure. But while we were waiting for her to get there, our neighbors fed me miso soup, rice, and a delicious chicken breaded with potato meal, with a little plate cut up perfectly for Lucy. Lucy, however, could not be bothered with food because she was too interested in the playmates and their toys. As I sat at the kid-sized table they have been using for family meals (because their toddler had started standing on her chair when they ate at the breakfast counter), I heard Lucy’s happy shrieks as she crawled through the long fabric tunnel in the playroom over the garage. We went home with a huge, helium-shaped red balloon that had a tiny, sweet-scented, cat-like creature stuffed with something dense, like sand, as a weight at its end. When we left for Asheville over a month later, the balloon was still going strong, standing like a sentry in the living room, in spite of much attention from a two-year-old (“Ba-BA!”).
After that, I remembered that I love baking, and discovered that Lucy does too, and that she is remarkably good at it for a not-yet-two-year-old. She can pour flour and liquids into a bowl without spilling. She can stir. We are working on the overpowering urge to stick her whole hand into the batter. But we made a yogurt cake together (a recipe from Bringing up Bébé) and I mis-doubled the recipe and had to add more liquids, so that we ended up with four loaves and took some to the neighbors. A few days later, they sent back butternut squash soup and homemade bread. We made banana bread and took it to the other neighbors, and they sent back a delighted message about baked goods and morning coffee. There are a few glowing threads in my Portland friend-mesh. Not very strong yet, but all the brighter for being the first.
In addition to friend-medicine, though, I have decided I need a short piece of self-help writing for the straddle-parent, who is staying at home with kids and working freelance. So I have begun to write one. This is the first half. The second is coming next week, I hope.