Issue No. 7: The Job

New motherhood is like a sort of drunkenness; a stupor that makes the days long and the weeks short. I committed to writing this newsletter every other week when I started—I looked up today and it had been two months. Oops.

The primary source of the stupor is repetition: repeating many small tasks with a relatively high degree of focus. No matter the week, day, or hour, my task is the same: “Feed the baby.” My daughter eats two scoops of formula mixed with four ounces of warm water six times a day. It’s about one bottle every two hours, except when she’s hungry and eats more, or when she’s not hungry and eats less. (Focus!) When she’s had enough to eat, she spits the milk out from her mouth and little rivers of it dribble down her chin and onto her clothes, making her neck and ears and hair always a little sticky. She gets her hands covered in milk, too, so they’re like little flytraps, reaching out to grab my glasses and pull my hair.

I carry cotton baby blankets with me like citizenship papers in a foreign country, prepared for any disaster. When I see the baby spitting up, sour milk gurgling from her mouth, I wave the blankets in my hands, “I have it, I have it!” And although I use the blanket first, my shirtsleeve is usually what works best, and I smell like cottage cheese for the rest of the day. Because of this, I wear only stained clothing at home, shapeless t-shirts and cotton shorts, the same three or four things, which adds to the stupor too. Also, because of the mess, I am constantly cleaning: Every counter in my house is dusted with a fine film of yellow formula. The washing machine runs non-stop. The dishwasher could always be filled or emptied. Bottles could be washed, diapers could be changed, and the trash always needs to go out to the curb.

This is my sisyphean assignment: feeding the baby, and cleaning her up.

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A few months after I had the baby, well meaning folks started asking, “Are you going back to work?” I’d say no, looking at my shoes. “I’m staying home. But of course I have work to do,” I’d add, hurrying to squeeze it in. “I’m writing, too.”

This was a strange justification to hear coming from my own mouth, because of course I was working. I was working harder than I’d ever worked before. I just wasn’t earning any income. I wasn’t on maternity leave from anything, and I wasn’t applying for new jobs. I made no money, and I was admitting it, publicly. That admission was the part that made everyone uncomfortable. Stay-at-home mothering calls into question all kinds of beliefs about money, self-reliance, dependence, value, and purpose. Three assumptions hang in the air when you say you’re a stay-at-home mom: 1.) You’re rich, and don’t have to work. 2.) You’re lazy, and don’t want to work. 3.) You’re a “trad-wife,” content with cupcakes, crayons, and gender-led subservience, who takes no interest in work.

I knew these biases existed out in the world; it was a surprise to learn how firmly they existed in my own mind. I began to notice my constant need to reassure people of my intellectual curiosities, my pursuits outside of motherhood, and my work history before becoming pregnant. “I’m just staying home while I write my novel,” I’d say. “We can’t afford for me to go back to work, anyway—childcare is too expensive!”

And both of those things are true. But what’s really true is that I can’t bear the idea of being away from my daughter. I don’t want to miss a single smile, or giggle, or curious touch. It’s a privilege to be Sisyphus, laboring up the mountain with a rock, because I get to do it with her. Many mothers do not have that privilege, and I am very lucky. Whatever I was trying to justify, to myself and others, wasn’t about work, but about value. Could I still be a valuable person, even if I smelled like cottage cheese?

Inevitably, these conversations would end with the same refrain: “Well, that’s okay, motherhood is the hardest job in the world!”

Here’s the thing: Becoming a mother is absolutely the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. My spine still aches from where the epidural went in, my tailbone shimmers with pain when I sit for too long. My shoulders are concave from constantly cradling the baby. I’ve gained weight, lost writing time, and completely abandoned the idea of enjoying a full night’s sleep. Something feels deeply incorrect about calling this sort of work a job.

“A day spent at home caring for a child could not be more different than a day spent working in an office,” author Rachel Cusk writes. “Whatever their relative merits, they are days spent on opposite sides of the world.”

Conflating those “opposite sides of the world,” or even making the mistake of comparing them as equivalents, reveals something about our culture’s binary categorizations of money and work. You’re either employed, or you’re not. You have a good job, or you don’t. You are self-sufficient, or you are a burden to everyone who knows you. The sin of financial failure looms large in our collective imaginations.

And yet, there are many times in life that require great amounts of work while offering no financial reward at all. Consider the 24-year-old cancer patient writing from her hospital room about boredom and exhaustion, or the 26-year-old writer devoting her mornings to AA meetings rather than hidden bottles of vodka. Consider the 60-year-old, very famous author who spent many months caring for an ill friend, rather than writing, or working, or selling her books, or doing a million other more productive things. How can you determine the value of all those efforts? Not by drawing a bottom line.

Of course breadwinning work is a form of caretaking too. We all need food and shelter and electricity; acquiring those things is no small task, certainly not when we do it for others. But in that case, the job is more than a job: it’s a means of provision, a labor of sacrifice. It’s an example of our interdependence rather than a testament to our individual autonomy. At different times in life, sometimes you’re the caretaker, sometimes you’re the one being cared for. For stay-at-home mothers with bread-winning partners, you’re both, at the same time.

Ultimately, I think the difference I’m trying to describe is this: A job is predicated on agreement. (“I will take X dollars for Y hours of work, as long as the arrangement works for me.”) But there are all sorts of other labors that are predicated on duty. Duty to help others, duty to be true to ourselves. (“I’m doing this because it is necessary for me to do it, regardless of whether it works for me or not.”) Sometimes our lives demand that we take time to battle disease, or master sobriety, or care for an ailing family member. Sometimes our duty calls us to an office, sometimes it calls us to spend years warming bottles and cleaning them up. If we use the accumulation of money as the only way to ascribe value to our days, we’ll miss the point. We’ll miss so much.

So, here I go, back to work.

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