I’m staying home with my five-month-old (and working here and there, partly for money and partly to stay sane), and I might as well just come right out and say it: I definitely have days when I’d rather be just working. Taking care of a baby is hard (and older children are even harder, in many ways) (how come no one told me this?), and that’s why the mere idea of being able to sit at a computer for an uninterrupted block of time during daylight hours–no rushing through projects before my son wakes from his always-too-short-naps–is enough to get me begging on my knees.

This didn’t happen to me when my first son was born. Why? Probably because I went back to work part-time when he was 16 weeks old. I did the requisite amount of lamenting our separation every Tuesday and Thursday, of course, but looking back, it truly was a gift, having that job to go away to.

We always hear about the working mom who wishes she could stay home but not much about the other side of that coin. What about the mothers who wish they could work but can’t?

Right now it makes more sense for me to stay home with my infant, so that’s what I’m doing, and even though some days I would kill for Mary Poppins to umbrella down from the sky and take the kid into a chalk painting for a few hours, overall I really am happy with the situation. To be honest, though, I suspect this happiness is tied tightly to the knowledge that I will only be in this position for a short time (we have a daycare spot saved for June 2013) because, like I said in the simplest terms above, taking care of a baby is HARD.

Have you ever been in the position of wanting to work but needing to stay home? Did you even dare say that out loud or is this one of those things “good mothers” aren’t supposed to talk about?

The plot! It thickens! Or thins, rather. I lost my job last week.
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Yesterday was big for America. The top story is of course the re-election of President Obama, but beyond that there were many other important issues at stake across the country. On my ballot, I got to vote on funding for education, financial support for the zoo and other public venues, the restructuring of the state’s three-strikes law, and the repeal of the death penalty. Some of you may have voted on the legalization of gay marriage, which is arguably the biggest issue of our time.

I’m not the most politics-savvy person out there, but I do make an effort to get informed on the current topics, and I always vote. If I don’t have a lot of time or energy for in-depth research on the propositions and measures and officials, I can at least make election season a time to reflect on and perhaps re-examine my beliefs about the way government can and should impact our lives. It’s probably not awesome that it happens as infrequently as it does, but hey, it’s better than nothing.

That said, four years is a long time. At the last national election, I was still pregnant with my older son, and then BOOM, yesterday I went to the polls with both him and my younger son, who’s creeping up on four months. I was proud to take them with and show them how the process works, but I was more proud that I was casting my votes with them specifically in mind. Although I like to think I have always voted for the good of the whole, with special emphasis on those who need government help the most–children, the poor, the sick–I’ve definitely started looking at my voting privilege differently since I had kids. Instead of just thinking about my vote, I now feel about it too.

When you have children, you’re no longer voting just for yourself, you’re voting for them–for what they do, for who they are, and for who they might become. What if we can’t afford private school and have to rely on public education? What if PBS lost funding and there was no more Sesame Street? What if one or both of them is gay? I’ll even admit that having children has complicated my feelings about abortion.

It’s one thing to vote for the vague “future of America”; it’s another when you realize that future is your own children.

Has becoming a parent changed your politics?

This week marks eleven years at my job, and how did I celebrate? By not going back to work after maternity leave. Yikes.
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I know this is super-old news, but as a nursing mother, and a working mother, I feel like I have to say something. Several weeks ago university professor Adrienne Pine made news for breastfeeding her infant daughter during the first day of class as American University, in Washington, D.C. A few students freaked out, as you’d expect (”Boobs! Ew!”), and the story made the front page of the Washington Post. Pine defended the incident via a blog post in which she insisted that breastfeeding her child while leading a lecture was neither an “incident” nor one that needed defense.

Naturally both Pine–who was teaching a feminist anthropology class–and the media made the issue about public breastfeeding and gender discrimination and natural, protected acts. Obviously this is why the story made headlines, but I’d argue that the problem–and yes, I do think breastfeeding a child in front of a class is a problem–shouldn’t be about how the baby was fed but that the baby was there at all. Pine said she had to bring her daughter to class because she was too sick to attend daycare. How was she, then, not too sick to bring into a college classroom?

As for the feeding issue, the thorn for me isn’t that a woman was breastfeeding in public or even in a classroom, it’s that she was breastfeeding while teaching a class, and there’s no way that wouldn’t be distracting any less so than if she were bottle feeding or spoon feeding her baby. A natural act–even a legal, protected act–does not necessarily mean it’s an appopriate-in-all-situations act. Does a professional actor bring her baby on stage during a performance? Does a judge feed her baby under her robe?

Although Pine insists it wasn’t a stunt and that she didn’t want to turn the “incident” into a “teachable moment” (just coincidence that it happened during a feminist anthropology course, then?), I wonder why she didn’t hire a babysitter for the short duration of the class. She actually did this the very next day. Since the baby is normally in daycare, I’d assume she can be bottle- or spoon-fed by someone besides her mother, and that’s where I take issue with the idea that breastfeeding while teaching class was the only–or even best–option.

I wrote about my own feelings on public breastfeeding here, and I too have experience breastfeeding my non-bottle-taking first son at the office. I did it behind a closed door on a break, though, not while leading a staff meeting or giving a public presentation.

I really don’t think the issue here is about nipples or gender discrimination or even breastfeeding but about professional conduct, which I’d say was breached by having a baby in the classroom at all, regardless of how she was fed. If a male professor brought a child to class and bottle fed him during a lecture, I’d feel the same.

What do you think? Was it appropriate for Pine to breasfeed her sick daughter during class?

Just because I like being a working mom doesn’t mean I don’t fantasize about how the other half lives. When I picture myself as a full-time stay-at-home mom, I’m…
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My maternity leave ends in six weeks, and I’ll probably spend at least four of those weeks stressing out about what to do with the baby when I go back to work. (I’ll spend the other two ignoring the issue completely.)

When I went back to work after my first son was born, I made the switch from full-time to part-time (in the office Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays), and my husband was also working part-time then (Tuesdays and Thursdays), which meant whoever wasn’t on the job that day was the stay-at-home parent. Bottle-feeding problems aside, this was a wonderful solution, since I didn’t have to go through the agony of handing my baby over to a caring but paid stranger until said baby was a year and a half old.

This time around, my husband is working full-time and, between steady contracts and freelance gigs, so am I. I could probably give some of that up (and likely will have to), but for now I’m researching solutions that will allow me to keep the jobs I love without sacrificing quality time with the baby I also love (and happen to love more than I love work, for the record).

The good news is I work entirely from home, so I have a lot of options. We don’t have any family in the area who could help, but the next best thing might be hiring a babysitter to come in for a few hours every day, so at least the baby could stay at home. There are also nanny-shares in the neighborhood, as well as in-home daycares and more formal ones not too far away. (My older son’s awesome daycare doesn’t have room for more infants right now, so we have to wait on that.) I’ve also thought about just trying to do it all, all by myself, but having been in this position before, and I know that I’ll only be making a hard situation harder, and that all bets are off once the baby figures out how to move himself across a room.

I know there’s no option that will make me feel happy to pass my newborn over to a stranger at this point, but I also know that it’s probably necessary and definitely worth a shot (especially considering that sending my older son to daycare was one of the best things we ever did, for him and our family).

Here’s my call for advice and words of encouragement and/or warning. What did you do when you went back to work while your baby was still a baby? Did you find a solution you loved? Did you suffer through one you hated? Did you figure out something that felt sort of in between–maybe not ideal but a good enough fix for the time being?

It’s back-to-school time for the kiddies and back-to-work time for me. Remember how I thought I’d take two weeks off work after having my baby and then just jump right back in? Well, here I am with a seven-week-old and I’m still chugga-chugga-ing at the station and only just now starting to move (slowly, slowly) down the track.
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It seems like every woman who has ever been pregnant can recall a handful of crazy dreams about all things impending motherhood. They’ve dreamt about giving birth to toddler-sized babies who come out fully dressed and speaking in sentences, they’ve dreamt about nursing kittens, they’ve dreamt about giving birth while co-piloting in a twin-engine plane with Hugh Jackman. (Okay, I made that last one up, but it’s probably happened to someone.) I’m sure I’ve had some crazy pregnancy dreams along the way, but I can’t remember anything specific. What have I been dreaming about, though? Work. Yay.
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I go on maternity leave next Monday, and although I can’t help thinking of it as a (glorious, hard-earned, much deserved) break, I know, intellectually, that I’ll have plenty to do while I’m not working. More than plenty, in fact, and none of it involves afternoons spent sipping lemonade or getting a foot massage or lovingly monogramming a stack of burp cloths as high as the moon. Nope, for however long I have off before the baby comes, all of that “extra” (HA) time will be spent preparing for the baby by finally taking care of things I feel like I should have dealt with months ago. Something tells me this isn’t unusual for working women who already have at least one child at home, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still frustrated with myself.
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