(Deciding to Go Back to Work)
You are so lucky if you’re a mom who actually gets to choose whether to go back to work. Some aren’t that lucky, so count your blessings. Leaving your baby can be incredibly hard. Earlier in the book, I talked about how I just wanted to lock myself in my room with my baby and sell Avon products from home. I couldn’t even imagine passing him off to another caretaker and heading off to work. But as months went by, I knew I had to go make a buck, so I dug in and found enough strength to take my first job back.
I was asked to do an episode of Less Than Perfect. The first day I got there, I cried. I cried all week. I actually called the Home Shopping Network from the set to see if I could sell crap on TV so I didn’t have to work full time anymore. They told me that I’d have to be the one to supply the crap to sell, not them. Considering that I had no crap to sell, I knew I had to keep trucking along.
I was picky about the jobs that would come my way. I didn’t want to do anything that took me away from my baby or wasn’t financially profitable. “You want me to go overseas and do a movie with Brad Pitt?…No, thanks, I’ll take the local junkyard commercial that’s paying pretty well so I can be home with my baby.” (Okay, maybe I would have made an exception for a Brad Pitt movie.)
I don’t mean to make going back to work sound miserable because there was an extremely positive thing that happened when I went back. I noticed that having a sense of self—doing something for me—felt really, really good. To know that I was actually good at something besides changing poo-poo diapers in thirty seconds or less, and having an audience laugh at my character rather than my maternity muumuu felt great. This part of me understood why some moms can’t wait to go back to work. I definitely got it. I wanted the best of both worlds. But how does one get that?
Sadly, I still don’t know. To this day, if I work all day and don’t see my son, I wake him at night to play with him. I have to…I call it “The Working Mom Guilt Syndrome.”
Ugh!…GUILT! My husband—this could very well be your husband, which is why I’m sharing this with you—didn’t really have a problem in this area. Guilt from being away from their babies during the day doesn’t seem to faze men much, but it BOGGLES the hell out of me.
If I’m coming home late from work and haven’t seen the baby all day, you might see me driving on sidewalks and hitting a few pedestrians to get home fast. When I open the door, I leap toward the baby and make crazy gestures and noises to celebrate my arrival. I want my baby to know that mama bird flew back home to her nest as fast as she could.
My husband, on the other hand, will enjoy his ride home and maybe stop at the newsstand for some magazines. And when he walks in the door, he’ll hit the fridge first, then the bathroom, and then go see the baby. THAT’S CRAZY TO ME!! Why they don’t have the same parental instinct as we do really bothers me!! I used to think my husband was having a problem connecting with my son until my friends reported the same things about their husbands.
So don’t fret if your husband doesn’t walk in the door doing cartwheels at first. Someday soon he won’t be able to resist your baby’s open arms as he stands at the front door saying, “DA DA.”
Meanwhile, if you’re lucky enough to stay home and be the caretaker of your baby, good for you. Enjoy it while you can, and don’t forget that doing something for yourself is so important—whether it’s being really good at surfing the Internet or joining that class. The more fulfilled you are, the happier your home will be!