Motherhood and Work

I went back to work full-time last week, to the hardest and most surgical rotation of the year. And E started daycare at Hopkins. She refused to eat or sleep the first day, so there I was: at daycare, getting paged while struggling to breastfeed through her fussiness. At clinic, getting calls about her, trying to remember to pump and find a place to do it, trying to finish in time to pick her up. In between everything washing my hands like a madwoman.

I have been everywhere along the work vs. motherhood debate: raised with Focus-on-the-Family values, by a stay-at-home mom who later worked; absorbed in an unforgiving career, having stayed at home with the baby the last three months. All I can say is, none of it is easy. Staying at home with her is more exhausting than a day at work. Working in a non-family-friendly, driven culture is difficult and lonely. I used to see the issue as pretty black and white, but now I’m all sorts of gray.

I can’t work the way I used to work before I had E. I can’t be a mother the way I used to before I worked. And the adjustment is tough. There are the logistics of getting her there and back, and dealing with all the bottles, ice packs, and pump parts involved in maintaining her on breast milk, which is a full-time job in itself.

But even harder is the emotional subtext. There’s all kinds of guilt, and fear—of leaving her, of putting limits on my work. I have to go here on faith. I have to believe God is sovereign, that he ordained her to be brought into my life at a time when I don’t have much choice about things. I have to believe that He loves her more than I do and has some purpose for my finishing this training, and to be faithful to both simultaneously is not an impossible thing. I’m starting with the fundamentals. Trying not to be paralyzed by worry, trying to be open. I’ll probably be writing more about this later, but for now, I’m just taking it one long day at a time.