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.

Chris is away staying at a hotel for the next two nights because his company is having their annual kick of here. And the company is requiring everyone to stay at a hotel even if they live in New York City because they wanted to create a Covid bubble to ensure that everyone remained safe. This is a little bit ridiculous when you think about it because when you have colleagues who are traveling from literally around the world who have not seen each other since before the pandemic, it is highly unlikely that you are going to prevent and police them from socializing with people that they know outside of work as well as each other outside of work events. And also, if you are at work events, you will be mingling with your colleagues, so how is that any different than mingling with them at a bar or at a restaurant? 

Needless to say, I was pretty annoyed at this… who decided on such a stupid and senseless set up? This also meant that I felt even more overwhelmed without him around, even though he had already gone back to work technically and was working from home. So we arranged for our night nurse to come three nights in a row, which we have never done before. In addition to that, my very good friend offered to come and stay overnight to help out with the baby’s daytime bottle feeds. 

I was grateful for my friend’s help. But it also made me even more cognizant of the fact that I have no family nearby to help when situations like this come up. And when you think about it, you can really only rely on your friends to help out this way just so many times before it becomes a bit tiring for them. For example, my friend was super eager to help out, especially because she had not seen me or the baby since the day after we came home from the hospital because she didn’t want us to get exposed to her potential exposure to Covid. And while she said she was happy to help with the first and second bottle feed, every subsequent bottle feed, you could tell that she was a little bit less excited each time and saw it as a bit of a chore.

I don’t blame her. It is a chore, especially when you have to do it 7-8 times a day. It’s not fun anymore and is just something that has to get done. It has diminishing marginal utility like most things that we enjoy. But that is life with a child – there are things that are not glamorous that you just have to get done for them to grow and be nourished.

And if you don’t have family or friends nearby, you’ll end up having to spend a lot of money on paid help. And well, we don’t have Jeff Bezos’s bank account size, so that ends up adding up… REALLY quickly.

I am not quite sure why officially, modern companies of today call maternity and paternity leave “baby bonding leave.” It seems like it is a way for companies to make it sound like welcoming a child into your family is just all fun, games, smiles, coos. What it actually is that they do not want to acknowledge is a full-time job that is actually beyond a “full-time” job that we tend to think about, as in, a 40 to 50+ hour work week. Being a parent, especially to a newborn child, is a full-time job in its truest sense, as in a 24–7 job, with no breaks unless you have hired help or family nearby or a loving partner who believes in an egalitarian  parenting style and division of responsibilities. What family leave at companies should be called is “keep your baby alive and make sure she is growing adequately, or else.“ Because that is really what the first few months of life is like for a newborn child. Those are the responsibilities of the parents: to make sure that their child is eating enough to grow and that she does not die.

That sounds a little bit daunting and bleak, but that is actually true. For the first number of precious weeks of your child’s life, she is not going to be able to see beyond 8 to 10 inches away, and when she is able to “see,” she can only see outlines and blurry images. She is not going to be able to see your face full on. She is not going to be able to register different colors from the others. She will though, be able to differentiate different voices. Eventually, she will be able to see your face and see different colors and register different shapes, but that is not immediately. She is going to rely 100% on you for literally everything: food, shelter, changing her diapers and ensuring she is not soiled. She will even need you to hold up her head because her head will be too heavy for her to hold up with her weak neck that needs support for at least the first 2 to 3 months of her life. It makes you wonder how evolution made human babies so useless and helpless, especially when you compare them to other animals in the animal kingdom, some of whom are able to stand or even walk on their own immediately after exiting their mothers’ womb.

I just think it’s funny and a bit of an insult that baby bonding leave is called what it is called. We should all just be a little bit more honest and blunt and call it what it really is. It’s exhausting to sugarcoat reality.