I hum the old standard to myself, puttering around the house as the rain pours down, whipped in fierce sheets against the side of the house. “Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky, stormy weather . . . ”
How lovely life seems, even rainy gloomy thunderstormy life, when I’ve had a reasonable amount of sleep. Just a couple of days ago the sun was shining on a 65 degree glorious spring day, and nevertheless I walked through the day biting back tears, listless, feeling bleak and depleted. I tried walking the neighborhood, I tried napping, I tried doing laundry (to feel useful), and then abandoning the laundry (to feel free to rest). Nothing would do.
But for the past two nights the baby has slept from 8pm til 1am, then nursed and slept again til 4:30, and then we linger together in my big king bed, dozing side by side til some time in the seven o’clock hour. This may sound like horrifyingly NOT ENOUGH SLEEP to many of my readers, but with a new baby this is heaven. Two nights in a row of heaven, of 4+ straight hours, enough time for me to get some good REM sleep and wake to his cries refreshed instead of bitterly tired. And suddenly, though the sun is absent from the sky, it is shining in my heart, and I’m humming my way around the house. La-dee-daaaaaa, ho hummity hooooo, what shall I do today with all this time before the big boys get out of school?
I have three weeks left of leave. How quickly it passed! I knew it would, and yet it still surprises me. I face my return to work with a mixture of excitement and terror. I enjoy my job, and the thought of drafting a summary judgment, prepping for trial (I have a trial this summer), drafting discovery, and even just cleaning out my email in-box fills my little OCD heart with glee. But the job is high pressure and high stress. Because of the billable hour – lo, that curse of every law firm lawyer’s life – it is a difficult job in which to succeed when one has small children at home. I keep it pretty well balanced, day to day, but if I want to bill enough hours to not get fired, enough sleep to not keel over, enough exercise to not have aches and pains in this old body, and enough time to enjoy my lovely sons, then I have no room for error. One kid gets sick and the whole thing falls apart, and it takes weeks to gather it all back up again, usually at the expense of my own sleep and exercise, which are activities I try very hard to protect. My profession has a low tolerance for domestic concerns. (It’s getting better, as more and more of the male lawyers have working wives and thus have to take their turns staying home with a sick kid, or leaving “early” (5:30) to pick up the kid from daycare . . . but it’s still tougher than most on the working parent, no matter what Gwyneth Paltrow says.) I am deeply anxious about what this new, third son is going to do to my productivity, and thus to my job security. I am also deeply anxious about leaving him in someone else’s care all day, my own little sweetheart – but we are trying not to think about that. It makes me a little panicky to think about that, so I wall off the thought. No need to start weeping this far in advance.
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I started this post a few days ago. I had a couple of grumpy days and good days in between . . . postpartum hormones and sleep cycles make me bipolar. Yesterday was one of the good days – a glorious spring day. I used it to re-pot some houseplants, dig up and throw away all of the outside plants that died in the frost, and buy a new pair of ferns for the two terra cotta pots that flank the front door. I dug out a bed for some hydrangeas in the backyard and planted them, their giant blue heads nodding over to kiss the top of the mulch. Walking around Lowe’s earlier in the day with the baby’s car seat perched in the cart on top of a giant bag of cedar mulch, it was difficult for me not to buy All the Flowers. I resisted, but it was hard.
In the evening, the Professor grilled burgers while the older children bee-bopped around him on the driveway, trying to draw a hopscotch with sidewalk chalk. In the house I made pasta salad with my hands and rocked Craig’s little rocker with my feet. He was a touch fussy, so I held him in my lap during dinner. While attempting to take a bite of my burger, dropped a giant blob of ketchup all over him. The boys giggled. After dinner we put on “What Does the Fox Say,” and the boys did air guitar around the kitchen. I tucked the baby in my arms facing out, and the boys held his hands and danced with him, too. Then baths, and bed – Craig slept in his crib, for the first time, and did ok.
It is Tuesday. He gets his shots today. He’s almost nine weeks old. Zoom goes time, and I hang on with both hands.