After four months, three weeks and one day of maternity leave, I came to a sort of boiling point the other morning. As I write this, Ava seems to have finally corrected herself after seven back-to-back weeks of unutterably shite sleep, but for a while there, the Four Month Sleep Regression (if you know, you know) hung gloomily over me. During those relentless days – where people remind you that “it won’t last forever” and all you want to do is hurl something heavy at them – my edges felt blurry and inconstant under its glare. I’d been the kind of tired that doesn’t seem to warrant a proper, catch up lie down, but meant my eyes had a caffeinated glaze and I wafted through my day slightly wired. (Though with less thumping bass and no one with their hands in the air, hugging.) I’d open cupboards and forget why I was there and had a habit of ending my sentences too… well, you know. And in that slippery old time where the hours seemed to lurch forward of their own accord and I could swear I heard a distant ringing in one ear, I began to get really fucking over it.
I’ve lost count of the times that other mothers have visibly winced (one even shot her hand out to touch my arm, in a devastated reflex) when I say I’m going back to work in November. I’d always planned to take about seven months off. In South Africa that would be incredible. In the US, unheard of. But since we are offered a year in this country (not particularly well paid in my opinion, but that’s another blog), it seems to be the general assumption that you should take it. The thing is, deep breath, I’m not sure I really like maternity leave. Odd days where I wolf down cake and really good coffee and chit chat with mum friends, while the sunshine beats down on our cheeks, or I take a trip into the city and walk along the river or stroll through a museum, gulping in the murky Thames and the hum of the tourists, or I sneak off to the park in the middle of the day and stroll through the leafy dappled light and pull at the cow parsley – those days are perfect. But that is not my normal. It’s not my everyday. The majority of maternity leave is hoovering up eternal crumbs, changing nappies and considering if downloading Wonder Weeks will make you a better parent. It’s not laughing with your newborn as they develop some amazing new skill right in front of your very eyes, it’s great, big pockets of time while you wait for your baby to finish napping where you wipe pee off the loo seat and buff coffee cup stains out of table tops; shloof the grime off from underneath the plug and wash thousands of boxers and knickers and tiny baby vests with alarmingly yellow stains up the back. The pandemic hasn’t helped, as it’s put paid to all the baby groups that you quickly realise are as much, if not more, for you than your baby, but the full time, at home, mundane drudgery of it is exhausting. I keep those precious, perfect days in a little jar and take them out when a day yawns hopelessly ahead of me; rolling it around my tongue like a gobstopper from my childhood and then put it back, before it reduces to a tiny lump and I accidentally swallow it. I’ve gone from a busy, fulfilling job where I feel, mostly, in control, working with like-minded colleagues who support and respect me and communicate clearly and articulately when they need things from me, to an unpaid cleaner and cook trying to work out the instructions to a totally irrational, erratic and at times frighteningly furious small person.
But even second time around, with the value of hindsight, I galloped giddily into it with naïve, open arms, because the general consensus is that we should love this time. Women, after all, are natural caregivers. Only, is that actually true? Am I more qualified than my husband to look after my baby or have I been socially conditioned to think that? Where is the real line between nature and nurture when it comes to that maternal tug? Because the problem with telling generation after generation of women that they are instinctual carers, is that when caring for my baby feels relentless and Sisyphean, I don’t just feel rubbish about her roaring her head off, I question my very identity and ability as a mother. That questioning slowly decays into guilt which seeps deep into my bones and underneath my skin and feels greasy and clotted; an ugly, heavy stick with which I can routinely beat myself. Untangling this shitstorm of emotions is trickier than pinning down my curly-headed daughter on hair wash night. When I tried to explain this to my husband it came out self-pitying and a teeny bit maniacal. As far as he’s concerned, me getting to stay at home with a baby whose face he wants to kiss off is a delicious treat. And it is! But he gets to retain some semblance of his ‘old’ life by leaving the house to go to the office, while I stay at home and unpack the dishwasher again. You may believe you’re in an equal partnership with the person you have a baby with, but maternity leave tips the scales and sends the neatest of balances wildly off kilter.
Our patriarchal society routinely demonstrates that care is unimportant (funding in the care and health sector is at a crisis and wages are pitiful) and care staff – both paid and unpaid - are predominantly made up of women. We may admire caring, we may even clap for it, but the actual value we place on it is woeful. Women on maternity leave are always in a precarious, slightly vulnerable state – knowing that even though this unique time away from the workplace will undoubtedly make them better and more efficient at their job, it will also invariably cost them promotions and opportunity. This underlying fear and culturally entrenched disregard for care means that the ‘career woman’ in me struggles to find merit and even, at times, joy in the neat, gender role I have fallen into on maternity leave. The real burden doesn’t even come from my child – who is both simple and demanding all at once – but rather the expectation of care. It is that we should take so much joy from it. This is not to say I don’t respect women who do find joy from choosing to stay at home and run their household, but as someone who didn’t choose that, it feels like a crappy add-on to the package that comes along with my baby.
My identity has many roots and, clearly, more of them are wrapped tightly around my job than I thought. After weeks of guiltily sitting with this lack of purpose, I’ve realised that I refuse to apologise my way through motherhood. I love this tiny little human who is so totally dependent on me, but I don’t love being uniquely and wholly defined by my role as a mother. I need to be more. But while I’m on maternity leave I need to stop fighting it and accept that the ‘more’ has to take a back seat for a little while. Because it’ll be back. Having experienced all of this before (and the same, bored uselessness as my husband gently reminded me) I know I’ll blink and it’ll be gone, so I’m grabbing those perfect days and every tiny, shiny moment with my daughter with both hands. But please don’t pity me as it draws to a close. Turns out, I’m not really the maternity leave type. And that’s okay.