The Carraway Seed

Tomorrow morning I’m going back to work — my leave is up. Laurel’s seven weeks and a day and a half old, and sleeping on a blanket next to me on the sofa.

I have a novel and challenging job, but my enthusiasm for going back to it full time is muted. Looking after a baby is exhausting and frustrating and sometimes tedious, but it comes with a lot of built-in rewards that make it feel good when you’re doing it. We had almost two months to orient ourselves towards being a family and get accustomed to what taking care of a child is like. We got to spent most of our waking hours watching Laurel develop in lots of little subtle ways that you can see when you spend that much of your time and energy watching. It’s been really rewarding.

The subtleties of development worry me a little, because they’ve been important in appreciating Laurel as a growing person, who’s gradually acquiring abilities instead of just switching from lacking them to possessing them. They’ve also been, in part, why it feels good spending time with a creature that’s otherwise just a small bundle of almost constant needs. My job’s going to take a big chunk of my Laurel-time directly, and require me to defend another chunk from her needs when I’m around so I can get enough sleep to do my job adeqautely. In what time is left, I can be with her, and with Beth, and tinker with gadgets, and tend the garden and work for the Debian project and the other hundred things I overload my time with.

I had more time to spend at home than most fathers get, and went to quite a few parental events where I was the only man in the room, or walked around on streets where I was the only man carrying a baby. I got to obstinately carry a pair of testicles into events described using the word “mom,” and was for the most part accepted and encouraged. But it wasn’t going to last, largely for the same reason that there weren’t any other men in those rooms; most of those moms had partners supporting them (or, this being San Francisco, had inexplicably weird careers you can pursue from home or cafe in small snatches of time and a lot of cellphone conversations.) Income distributions, workplace patterns and biology being what they are, most men don’t have the option to reduce their work load that far.

All of which points to the part which bothers me the most about going back, namely that Beth and I will be playing an unavoidably asymmetric role in Laurel’s life for a while. She won’t see me as much, won’t have me involved as much of the time, which makes maintaining my own importance a bit harder than it would otherwise have been. Doable, but harder. I’ve heard plenty of perfectly reasonable arguments that young children focus more on their mothers regardless of who’s around, that things even out a bit later on, etc. I’ve heard a couple of quite touching stories of kids spending years looking to their mother for care and nurturing before one day turning to their father for guidance on how to grow up and deal with the world. So I don’t mean to sound fatalistic about my prospects; the downside just looms a lot closer right now.

With all that being said, there are some obvious positives. The extra adult-time will be nice. The excitement of my job will be good, at least once I re-learn how to deal with it. The prospect of feeling like a provider could be a good one. I’ll have a good reason to leave work at reasonable hours. I have a short commute, and my family will be right on the other end of it.

This seems as good a time as any to note some things that I did get to do while on on leave:

• Helped deliver Laurel, obviously.
• Learned how to keep her fed, comfortable and not smelling too horribly like spoiled milk
• Carried her through the Castro just before midnight on a Thursday night
• Wore her everywhere, thus getting fawned over by women of all ages
• Logged her first hundred or so public transit miles (and three zipcar rentals)
• Gave her her first diaper change, bottle feeding, spoon feeding, pouring-from-a-little-bowl-and-making-a-huge-mess feeding; her first bath, first change of clothes, first walk around the block; saw her first smiles, heard her first cooing sounds.
• Let her sleep on me lots of times
• Worried over something that was wrong with her, worked on a solution, fixed the problem, stopped worrying
• Took a lot of pictures
• Got on friendly terms with our neighborhood UPS man
• Kept her out of the hospital (as a patient, anyway)
• Introduced her to all her nearby family
• Introduced her to heavy metal, industrial/EBM, synth-thrash and NPR comedy programs
• Watched her focal range expand so that she’s now fascinated with the world rather than continuously screaming about it

It was a good seven weeks.

- Devin