I went back to work on Monday. My maternity leave scheme worked! I was not yet eligible for FMLA, thus I did not have any protected leave related to childbirth because of the very bad country in which I live. So I told them when I planned to come back to work and dared them to fire me. They did not. And that was my scheme. I pulled it off!
(I can’t believe it’s been nearly a year since I applied for this job from from my former employer’s “wellness room”, where I had taken to hiding out to avoid the smells of Jimmy John’s Italian subs which seemed to appear constantly in my immediate vicinity. I was seven weeks pregnant and sick as a dog.)
I would prefer to continue to be home, because my baby is very small and fed only on milk and because my body, like a very pokey X-Man, is still healing itself from the catastrophic event that is routine vaginal birth. Three more months at home, maybe. Four more months. But I don’t mind doing the work that I do, and I especially like the part where they pay me.
Caring for a new baby, and a preschooler, and a household, requires 100% of one type of energy but 0% of a different type of energy for me. The first requires an orderly yet scrappy creativity. The second energy, though.. That one is a creative energy as well, but a less practical and more imaginative one, and when you don’t use it, you start to wonder if it is receding away from you, disappearing forever, a colorful mist that when you reach out to touch it, it turns to nothing in your fingers, and you wonder if the non-domestic part of you has died a quiet death while you were busy wiping dried yogurt off of upholstery using a black sock that needed laundering anyway (orderly! scrappy!) and you didn’t notice it flickering out into oblivion.
I watched two French series on Netflix during my maternity leave, La Mante and Les Revenants (Both very watchable, by the way, if you have the stomach to take in grisly as hell images and themes while holding a fresh new baby to your breast, which apparently I do.) Watching these shows, in a language I used to speak at times daily or exclusively, sent a set of mental pinwheels spinning brightly in the wind. That chaotic, imaginative creative energy. Lol I think I am trying to claim here that watching TV qualifies as an Artist’s Date? All these long-forgotten turns of phrase dusted themselves off and took up real estate in my mind again. Things were blooming. I was alive and awake.
Sometimes I’d answer Desi’s questions in French, just to annoy him. Just to amuse myself! And when Nick and I are trying to communicate without our son understanding us, which we usually do using Spanish words, sometimes I’d blurt out the French ones instead, which Nick doesn’t know and which accomplish nothing. But just to have all this activity, mentally, was thrilling, even if it was like defective fireworks from a roadside stand that ignite but only spin in a circle on the ground. It was more than the mental dial tone I heard for the first ten months of Desi’s life as I tried to claw my way back to myself. It was a relief.
(I also obviously watched a great deal of English language streaming content, because it was maternity leave and it was winter and television is a treasured friend of mine.)
All of this Frenchiness led to me referring to my return to work as only LA RENTRÉE, always in all caps despite existing solely as a mental refrain. LA RENTRÉE! When I was a Young Student of French, there was much fuss made of LA RENTRÉE as a concept which (*condescendingly helpful polyglot voice*) is how the French refer to autumnal back-to-school season. Every time I was reminded of LA RENTRÉE, my rentrée, I inhabited a character of a seen-it-all old French guy on a park bench, and said to myself “ahh ouais, LA RENTRÉE” and moved on to the next thought.
The last time I had to LA RENTRÉE (now it’s a verb), it was so inconceivable that I didn’t even know what bucket to stash my anxiety in. When I tried to picture what it would feel like, or look like, it was so abstract as to elude me entirely. I had, until that point, never been a working parent, I had only ever been the full-time caregiver for my baby since he’d started existing outside of my body. I’d never spent more than an hour or two away from the baby, never long enough to replace a feeding even when I left a bottle behind “just in case.” We had gone on one or two sad little post-partum date nights that our friends had arranged for us like matchmakers, walking to get pizza and beer or whatever. We would attempt the kabuki of being elated to be free, but really we were just so tired. What was there to talk about except how tired we felt?
I did not know how to use a breast pump; I made my friend do a demo for me.
How would we get ourselves up and out the door in the mornings by a certain time? Where would we set the baby down while getting ready? (My first baby was not the variety you could casually set down, though I probably should have realized sooner that the baby expressing loud displeasure was different from, like, abuse.) It all ended up fine, doable, non-traumatic, a little sad, a hassle, not my favorite, not the worst.
Nick and I joke that our family motto is “Ready for anything, prepared for nothing” which was the tagline on the movie poster for “Kicking and Screaming.” This time around, I may have overcorrected on going back to work. The evening before LA RENTRÉE found us returning from a semi-impromptu visit to my brother and sister-in-law in DC at 10 at night, and I didn’t remember where my breast pump was. The refrigerator was so bare that it only contained leftovers in Pyrex that had long spoiled. The small town grocery stores were closed already. We barely cobbled together a lunch for Desi for the next day out of pantry dregs. And we’d missed trash day again. Ah, ouais. La rentrée.
This was all funny, probably because I found the right antidepressant dosage for me and because I have a baby that sleeps. Things are rarely “funny” when sleep deprivation has whittled you down to the bone. Prepared for nothing, indeed. (My friend Robin recently asked me, as we were DMing each other “Kicking and Screaming” quotes, if we named Jane after Olivia d’Abo’s character...to which I said, listen, we didn’t NOT name Jane after Olivia d’Abo’s character.)
I am back to the nuisance of pumping my breasts in a dusty, junky room between a bucket of stagnant old mop water and a gun safe. (Where else would you have the college’s trap shooting team lock up their guns but in a decommissioned mailroom behind the public safety office??) The set of keys are labeled “TRAP” so I kick off every pump session by listening to “Trap Queen” and undressing like I’m a hot video girl and not a soft, melty mom hooking up a small-scale agricultural device to my udders.
It all feels lighter than it did last time, probably because I know I can stop pumping whenever I feel like it. This was technically true before, too, I just didn’t know it. It’s a weird, dumb form of torture, and a gross part-time job, and someday I’ll be old and my flesh will be soft from menopause instead of from pregnancy. Being a parent will have nothing to do with my body. And I’ll remember this weird thing I used to do to make food for my kids, expressing milk while scrolling my phone, or reading a book, or listening to Fetty Wap. I already feel a distance from it, like I’m barely remembering what it was like even though it’s still happening.
I found a copy of People on the floor by the gun safe which is how I learned that Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee is the sorta-First Lady of New York??? Do people who don’t live in New York know this? Can you imagine the tablescapes she whips up at the Governor’s Mansion?
She my nap queen / let her hit the bando
yr mate,
Evie
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