Ben Goes to School

I realize that it is taboo these days to talk about the fact that children are able to grow up with less anxiety and therefore have the very best opportunity for full physical and mental development if they are able to be with their mothers all day, especially during the first three years....It is when we voluntarily create a way of life that is not as good for our children as it should be that true guilt feelings surface, and rightly so.
--Norma Jane Bumgarner, Mothering Your Nursing Toddler

When I read those words last week, I felt a headache squeeze around my brain. Ben started daycare today. He will be going every Monday and Thursday. I have loved staying home with him for the past 15 months, but I'm ready to focus on my writing again. I'm going to be freelance writing and editing to earn some money and to stay involved with my professional life; I'm going to work on fiction and poetry so I can feel grounded in the larger world.

This is a choice: I am choosing to try to meet my own needs two days a week. I hope that Ben's needs can be met by the NAEYC-accredited daycare we've chosen for him. Last week when I took him by "school," he loved playing there and cried when it was time to leave. He responds well to new people and situations, and I'm sure that given enough time he'll enjoy the playground and the art projects. But it's nap time now, and I'm wondering how he'll do lying in a crib with other babies nearby, his new Pooh bear cuddled up beside him.

Later in Mothering Your Nursing Toddler, in the section called "Fathering and the Nursing Toddler," the author tells men, "When your wife complains about nursing, as doubtless she sometimes will, she needs you to slow her down and take some other pressures off herself. (Has she suddenly decided all the closets need cleaning this week? Or started writing a book? Making holiday plans?) Remind her of what you both want life in your family to be like, and why you want to meet your child's needs as fully as possible. Help her to get her priorities straight again."

God forbid women with small children write books! I love nursing and I love my baby, but my husband knows that if he ever gently tells me that I should stop writing and get back to nursing, there would be hell to pay. For me, writing is not equivalent to cleaning closets. I like the first half of MYNT, but the second half--in which the author never acknowledges that women could have an emotional and intellectual need to work--left me agitated and unhappy. In How To Avoid the Mommy Trap: A Roadmap for Sharing Parenting and Making It Work, on the other hand, author Julie Shields does a wonderful job of valuing the professional lives of women as well as the needs of children, and she shows how men can be more involved in parenting.

This is a choice, one we've made as a family. My husband has steadfastly declined to work part-time (it's not a practical choice for a tenure-track faculty member), and the way I see it, it takes two working parents to send a kid to day care. We both believe this is the best choice for our family.

That didn't keep me from bursting into tears in the parking lot, though. There are so many layers of emotion in this decision. I love Ben, and I want him to be happy and secure. When I can't write, though, I start to feel desperately unhappy. I think part of me is upset that I don't feel more guilty--that, after the initial tears, I like having some space to myself.

I can concentrate today. The cats sleep, unpersecuted, on the sofa. The house is quiet and I am alone. Alone. That brings tears to my eyes too. My husband has a space where he goes every day to do the work he finds important. And now I have space to work too. The afternoon I can eat lunch sitting on the back deck without worrying that a toddler will fall down the steps. I can finish my book discussion guide for See You Down the Road and send it off to NoveList. I can look over the first 50 pages of my novel and see if I can pick up the pace, and then research the next batch of agents to query.

Women writers have always felt the tension between mothering and writing. I'm hoping, though, that this mental space of my own will enrich both.

I have no one to chase after today....