Roaming on Back to Work
2018 – what a year of highs and lows. Pregnancy highs and bedrest lows. Baby highs and hospital stay lows. Pachinko highs and Islands in the Stream lows.
I’ve learned a lot these past 12 months. Many of those things aren’t relevant to this blog (ask me my opinion about onesies, compression socks, or 12-step K-beauty routines sometime), but one is: this year has challenged me to rethink the way I define my sense of place.
I started this blog last year, when I considered place purely in terms of far-flung foreign locations. I wrote from Budapest, from Paris, from Cape Town. I read, meanwhile, to better understand the destinations I traveled to. Reading was immersion.
But 2018 was different. I wrote largely from home and the hospital, and saw reading as a form of diversion. I read to broaden my horizons, to transcend the confines of my couch and my own anxious headspace. All that reading and writing taught me that place isn’t only the world beyond the bounds of home. It isn’t just Poland or Pennsylvania or Prague. Place is also where you spend time every day. And after months spent bouncing my baby (he’s cute, right?) around my house in pajamas, the space where I spend most of my time is about to change. I’m going back to work.
It’s been four months since I’ve seen the inside of an office, and twice as long since I’ve fully participated in my job’s work-around-the-clock-from-all-over-the-world culture. I feel a strong need to prepare myself for the return – buying a second breast pump to keep at work, purchasing a month’s worth of healthy snacks to stash in my desk, and stockpiling the cozy cashmere knits that I’ve decided will comprise my new Mom aesthetic. I’ve even graduated to a new (and very American) genre of parenting publications – books that advise on how to go successfully back to work when you’re neither physically nor emotionally ready.
Chief among them is Lauren Smith Brody’s The Fifth Trimester. In the parenting lexicon popularized by baby guru Harvey Karp (yes we have his robotic bassinet, and no I don’t know how I’d live without it), the fourth trimester is shorthand for those first fuzzy newborn months when your baby basically just wants to live like they’re still in the womb – lots of snuggling, sleeping, and soothing. The fifth trimester is what comes next, the time “when the working mom is born.” I’m not one for self-help books, nor a fan of non-fiction written in the vaguely patronizing ‘we’re just two girlfriends gabbing’ tone of women’s magazines, so I was prepared to hate this book. I didn’t. Instead, I raced through it, reveling in how recognized it made me feel. Brody knows that I’m worried about how to manage morning routines. Brody knows that the logistics of pumping and breastfeeding through 10-hour work days terrifies me. Brody also knows that I’m more than the sum of my baby-raising angst (“My hope is that this book will be for everyone but realistically if you're reading it, it's in part because you really care about your work.”)
Brody knows all of these things about me, just as I know, deep down, that no amount of organizing, reading, or sweater-buying will make going back in two weeks easy. There is something heartbreaking about knowing that I’m going to be walking out the door just when things start to get good – as Finnegan starts smiling and cooing and taking an interest in us. But there’s also something comforting in knowing that I’m not the first one – not even close – to do it. Plus I’m going to get a lot more reading done once my commute is an hour on the subway instead of ten steps to the living room.