One Year Later: Transition from Postdoc to Full-time Mom

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

It’s been almost exactly a year since I last wrote!  So much has changed since then. I might just use this post to describe my change from Postdoc Mom to simply Working Mom.

When CH was immobile, I could bring her with me to work. But as she started standing up, it became impossible. I remember the day I was labeling plants in the growth chamber. I turned away from her for half a second and when I turned back, her hand was in one of the pots. My mind leaped to our probable future: CH happily picking yellow flowers and playing in the dirt. She was happy but my experiment was not.

To rescue my study, I tried out a couple daycares, and both were horrible. I decided that I didn’t want to trust a stranger with my daughter unless someone I knew could be there too. That wasn’t going to happen. At last I asked one of my best friends to babysit on a regular basis, and she agreed, thank goodness. Now CH could play in the dirt while I worked without destroying my small corner of science.

Life was fine until other family demands became unavoidable. TM started getting bullied at school, and she was terrified of her teacher. That’s a story for another post. Her weight also plummeted, in an unrelated issue – the doctors diagnosed her with celiac. At the same time, Q was travelling quite a bit. I started having trouble keeping up my practical child psychology studies, gluten-free and dairy-free cooking experiments, and all my regular house/family duties. I finally dropped my work hours to one day a week, handing my work responsibilities off to various marvelous colleagues at work.

Doom and gloom started following me around. I escaped by flying down to CA to see my folks with the kids and the cat while Q went on an extended trip for work. We had a great time with my family! Sunshine and happiness were my constant companions. We came back with smiles and skipping feet, until we skipped right into two inches of water on the floor of our basement apartment.

Q quickly found a townhouse in a suburb with more space and more sun. We packed up our things as fast as possible, dried what was wet, threw out what was ruined, and left our former lives behind. It was a great way to purge our stuff. Power purging!

It was a huge struggle for me to realize that I couldn’t both work and be a mom. Some people can – I couldn’t. Over the last year, I realized that I’ve always put a high value on being successful in the workforce. I didn’t appreciate the work I did at home, and I always imagined Q not appreciating it, either. It took me months to come to grips with the idea that the work I did at home was valuable. I had to completely change my expectations for myself, expectations that I’d built up since first grade. Luckily I had very supportive friends and family, and my advisor at the university was also extremely supportive, as I gradually understood what I really wanted to focus on.

Now that I’ve updated my blog with my current path in life, hopefully I can use the next to tell you what we’ve been up to lately.