Over the course of the first three weeks of December, I stayed home to watch Maya while Janelle went back to the office. We swapped for a bit due some persnickety scheduling for her at work, and so that we could extend Janelle’s leave to allow Maya to be a bit older before she heads into daycare.
Looked at objectively, this is exactly what Janelle did for the three months prior (and will do for the next month)—she stayed home to care for our baby. Looked at through the still pretty gendered lens of parenting, I’m a bit of a unicorn for being a father who stayed home to care for his child all by himself. This is something I would prefer normally to downplay… but I’m also eager to record a few of my thoughts on what it was like being solo with Maya. I’ll say this before I go any farther though: this is not laudable. This is normal. I had a baby. I cared for said baby. I know enough about caring for a baby that I was able to do so without assistance. That those things can still be seen as surprising for a father is a bummer.
I was worried leading into my time with Maya that I wouldn’t have the temperament for it. My job requires a lot of fast task-switching and a constant stream of new info and interactions with tons of people. Time with a baby requires the ability to do one thing for a lot of time, and to minimize distractions. And while Maya is a “good” baby, she requires a lot of attention. I was expecting to go stir crazy.
Obviously, I survived, thanks in large part to Netflix and Amazon Prime Streaming. I managed to watch the equivalent of 2 movies a day almost every day I was home with Maya and for someone who loves to watch movies and never gets the time to, it was pretty excellent.
This will of course make it sound like watching a baby is a total picnic. For those of you who have never stayed home with an infant, let me break it down on why it is not.
Babies are bad at everything. I have covered this pretty extensively over the course of my various bloggings. This means that you need to do everything for them. The list is not extensive, but it is constant, and so you have the specter of what the baby needs next constantly hovering over you.
Like some shitty Fast and Furious knock-off, life with a baby is lived three hours at a time. 30 minutes prior to Maya waking, I heat up water in the microwave so that I can give her milk bottle a bath to get it up to the proper temperature for her to drink. When she wakes, I get her up, change her diaper and bring her down to give her a bottle. For this period of time, I am trapped on the couch until she is done. Bottle-feeding is typically faster than breast-feeding, so my feeds were usually only around 15-20 minutes. However, there were occasions when Maya would be snoozy and it would take twice as long as she snoozed and woke and snoozed and woke her way through the feeding. This was prime movie-watching time.
Once she’s up, it’s time to burp her. Once she seems burped enough, it’s time to play with her by letting her “jump” up and down on me. There’s like a 95% chance I get thrown up on here. For the first couple of weeks watching her, my only other real option was to lay her down on her back on the ground. I would then immediately lay down next to her and talk to her, or lay on my back and show her things and talk to her about them to keep her interested. Because if she loses interest, she gets angry and wants to roll over and if she rolls over she gets angry and then throws up and rubs her face in it. It’s important to give her tummy time so she can work on her muscles, but it gets super old watching your baby do the same thing that makes them angry and vomity every. single. time.
After she’s gotten angry and started spitting up more than is feasible to continue cleaning up, it’s time to pick her up and make a little seat of my arm and walk her around the house. Now, hopefully I’ve gotten about an hour of time out of the rest of the stuff because now I’m walking back and forth in the house with her until it’s nap time. If I’m lucky, she let’s me walk around by the TV. But if she’s grumpy, I need to keep changing the scenery. Bathroom. Kitchen. Upstairs. Downstairs. Say hi to the baby in the mirror.
Around about two hours after her last bottle it’s time to get her down for a nap. That process is fairly painless, as she’s a good sleeper. But, the nap itself has an upper limit of about an hour, but can be as short as 15 minutes. This means that any time I want to get something done, I have a mystery clock to race against. Need to shower? Haul some ass. Trying to answer some work e-mails? Hopefully nothing too hard. Want to make a sandwich? Cram that shit in your mouth.
This is the cycle. 3 times, every day. Well, 5 times every day, but the morning and evening cycles are broken up by caring for the two boys and Janelle provides the milk. So, it gets repetitive. I tried to break up the routine as much as I could by planning for outings whenever it seemed feasible. Trips to Target or the grocery store. Trips to get myself lunch or do some Christmas shopping. Trips are tricky. They’re tricky no matter what with a baby… but they’re tricky if you don’t bring the food source with. I can’t feed Maya when we’re out, so everything I did out of the house had to fit in the roughly two hours I’d have before her next feed. Plus, typically she’ll fall asleep in the car on the way home, which is a short, unsatisfying nap for her, and a ruined “free period” for me.
Even if caring for a baby is not hard (and some babies can make it VERY trying), it is repetitive and it can be very dull and it most certainly does not allow you the freedom that one might suppose. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, though. Mid-way through the last week she began to do better rolling over. She wouldn’t spit up at all sometimes. And she got better at grabbing toys, so I could plop her in her baby seat, put some toys within reach and talk at her while I worked on e-mail.
And that was the thing that I realized I had been missing out on with the boys. I stayed home with both of them when they were very little. So, my time at home with them each was when they were both sleeping like 90% of the time. I didn’t get a real sense of their development. And I had Janelle there to back me up all the time. But spending all day with Maya made very clear where her gains were being made. I could see her get more control over her arms. Or try out new grasps. I got to figure out what toys she liked to look at and what tricks would put her to sleep. I was an active parenting participant with the boys, but I became a Subject Matter Expert with Maya.
There’s also the battlefield camaraderie with Janelle. Obviously her time with babies alone will outnumber mine something like 56 weeks to 3 so it’s not quite a comparison, but I got a taste. We climbed our way up and slipped all the way back down the same slope over and over again for days at a time.
And it wasn’t hard. It wasn’t special. I didn’t need extra help. It was parenting. I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
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