This morning, the baby was much better when the nanny arrived. She seemed more like her normal self. She is starting to smile with the nanny and didn’t have any noticeable meltdown. I’m trying to give the nanny suggestions on things like how to hold or handle her to prevent the baby from crying or yelling out, which I’m sure our nanny is really thrilled about given what I’ve heard about nannies being annoyed when one of their parent bosses works from home and observing/critiquing everything. But hey, she signed up for this job knowing I’d be working from home full time, so she knew what she was getting herself into.

It’s my second week back “at work,” working from the second bedroom of our apartment, just a wall separating me from my baby. While I feel fine being in front of a computer and having meetings now, and my transition back to work has been a gradual one, I feel like I am languishing. I feel like I have zero motivation and work is just empty. It’s only the second week back at work, and I feel “meh” about it in the biggest “meh” way you can imagine. A few colleagues, including my boss, asked me if I was excited to be back, and I just said I felt okay. I wasn’t going to lie and feign enthusiasm about something that has been a hard mental transition for me. I’m so over the days of pretending to be someone at work who I am not. I never realized the transition mentally would be so hard, even if I had thought about it theoretically before. I just feel completely joyless doing my job. It’s not like I’m not doing the work I have or not responding to emails or Slack messages. I just feel a bit like a robot, doing these things because I have to rather than because I actually want to. I guess that’s the thing about “work:” not all of us are lucky enough to have a job where it doesn’t actually feel like work.

My colleague insisted I’d feel more “normal” about this in about two to three weeks, that I just had to give myself the time, patience, and grace to get back into the swing of things. I suppose that’s a fair suggestion. But I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t waiting for every work day to be over. I honestly rather go back to pumping milk around the clock than working at this point.