I have an essay called “The First Time Around” in an anthology that is coming out soon, From the Heart: A Collection of Stories and Poems from the Front Lines of Parenting. It compares my first year mothering to my first year teaching high school and explores the desire for a do-over, to fix all the mistakes you made the first time around.

So now I am a week and two days into parenting a second child and feel compelled to document this slice of now with a Venn diagram. Alas, I don’t know how to do that on Wordpress and have only so many (how many is never something I can predict) minutes until I will be called to nurse again, plus writing lying down is not the most comfortable thing. So I’m just going to make some lists. Please excuse the lack of parallel structure.

We’ll start with that thing about positions by giving a shout out to the few things that I look back on fondly from my first weeks after my son was born in 2006 via c-section (for a breech position and short cord that prevented him from dropping).

Positives about baby #1’s first weeks

• I could sit. Seriously. A c-section hurts a whole lot, but once you’re upright, you’re cool. I cannot wait to sit without pillows delicately arranged or frozen peas in my underwear.

• I had only one child. There was no monstrous four-year-old lurching around, slamming into his parents, kissing the baby ad nauseum, or needing to be taken to the park to preserve family sanity.

• My husband did everything. I don’t think I changed a diaper for two weeks. (See above that we didn’t have another child to take care of).
  

Similarities across both experiences

• I still have trouble sitting up from lying down and getting up to stand from sitting. It doesn’t hurt in my gut like it did when I was cut open, but the truth is I have no abdominal muscles now anyway, and it does hurt my bottom to switch positions.

• I love looking at my baby.

• Every day is a bad hair day.

Positives about baby #2’s first weeks

• At home! Sunshine instead of yucky florescent light, no strangers waking you up to poke at your progeny, no separation from the baby for hearing tests, no people bringing me (who is gluten-free and dairy-free) a cheeseburger the day after abdominal surgery and the next day, when I begged for something I could eat, telling me, “It’s hard to accommodate special diets.” In the hospital?

• No drug hangovers!

• Milk coming in right away! And like gangbusters! What a concept! After three years of nursing my son, I found out there was still a lot I didn’t know about breastfeeding! But apparently I do know how to get a baby to latch well in any position. No trips to the lactation consultant this time, at least not in the first week.

• A calm baby who seems comfortable in her own skin. Maybe just her temperament, but maybe from coming on her own terms or helped out by the flower essences I took during labor and gave her right after or the essential oils we used. I’m sure actually getting nourishment helps, too.

• Friends helping out — with food, with support, with childcare. And a whole lot of baby clothes.

• Having something of a clue as to what I’m doing and a lot less anxiety about what I’m doing wrong.

• Having a little boy who looks adoringly upon his mother and sister (with a head that seems a lot bigger than it did two weeks ago) and says sweetly, “It’s nice having a new baby.”

Childcare is a good thing.

This is how I felt yesterday as I drove to the sitter’s house six hours after dropping E off for no particular reason other than to get to some writing, cleaning and posting stuff of Craigslist and Freecyle in the hopes of eventually seeing my basement floor again. Outside of one long jag when I went to the Weston A. Price Foundation conference, this was the longest I’d left my son with someone who wasn’t his dad. The sitter was a SAHM who runs a daycare but whose clients have all left for now while she’s waiting to have her baby. I knew that E would enjoy playing with her daughter and that she’d call me if anything went wrong.

I got a little bit of several things done, and I had two meals in peace. Nothing was completed 100%, which always seems to be the case. The childfree time always has an endpoint, and I’m so protective of it I hate to even take phone calls when my son is napping or with a sitter. I’m so used to multitasking with him around, I crave doing one thing at a time when he’s not.

Still, I loved the feeling of looking forward to seeing my boy after a big chunk of time apart, knowing I wouldn’t tell him we had to do one thing over another for the last few hours of our day, other than have dinner and go to bed.

We enjoyed traipsing around the sitter’s courtyard and then playing with fire engines at home. A year ago he wouldn’t leave my side, and now it’s wonderful to hear him ask to go back to the sitter’s house rather than ask to nurse five times an hour.

Yes, I thought, childcare is a good thing. I later read an essay in Mama, Ph.D. about a theater professor cringing at her 30-hour a week childcare schedule during a baby gymnastics class where some toddlers were there with nannies and others were there with moms who were aghast that a woman would leave her toddler for two hours. There are clearly a lot of positions on the spectrum. Another was the essay “Day-Care Depression” featured in the new XX Files column in the September 7, 2008 Washington Post Magazine, in which Doreen Oliver talked about the joy she found in eleven hours of childcare a week while her son got sad, so they took a break and made a switch.

I feel very lucky to have found several folks my son has fun with and whom I trust. However, I’m constantly counting the minutes. So when my husband mentioned that he’d be home for the first hour of this morning’s four-hour nanny share (at our house) before leaving for a doctor’s appointment, I flipped out.

“We have to share the basement?! That’s not optimal,” I barked. In my childcare time-sheet, it’s lost time if I can’t be productive in the way I want to be when my son isn’t pulling my pantlegs. There were other things I could do — run errands, run a few miles — but I wanted to be able to set that agenda. Basically, Don’t F— with my free time, Dear.

Fast-forward a week…

I didn’t finish this post I started writing last week. Where did the time go!? Ha! Well, yesterday during my precious four hours of childcare time, I somewhat reluctantly headed over to a working-at-home moms meeting. I’d initially written off the meeting as just not an option since it was something I could have done with my son. Why pay someone to do something you can do with child in tow? But once I’d looked at the host’s web site, I realized she sounded like a cool person and a great professional connection to make and that it would probably do me good to stay in touch with other WAHMs in my immediate area. And the meeting was when it was.

“How long have you been working for yourself?” I asked the host. “When I looked at your web site, I felt like kneeling to bow, ‘I’m not worthy,’” I told her. She shared her journey of setting up her business pre-pregnancy and all the highs and lows since then.

My sense going into the meeting had been that all these other moms were doing real outside-the-home work and I was just dabbling to keep myself sane. But it turned out that we weren’t so far off from each other. In a little over an hour in one woman’s living room, I learned how three different moms balance the different parts of their lives and how they struggle with balance. Childcare took a good bit of our discussion time.

We talked about how our experiences with depression at different times have affected our work, our mothering and our marriages/partnerships. And I got to talk and listen without worrying about what my son was taking from another child or what books he was pulling off of someone’s shelves. There was an easygoing six-month-old in our midst, but all the toddlers and preschoolers were elsewhere. This meant we actually got to finish sentences, that is when I wasn’t interrupting people to add in some scintillating insight about how I could relate. (I think perhaps my son’s usual presence has helped me not dominate conversations so much. Hmm…)

Embarrassment over my lack of conversational restraint aside, it was great to share, both to hear stories and also share my own struggles such that one woman — the organizer of the group, in fact — sighed with relief, “I’m so glad to hear you say that. I thought it was just me.”

I’m coming to realize: it’s never just you, honey.

When someone else’s child is in bed, this mama mouse gets to play in her head.

I love babysitting. After bedtime, that is. I wrote recently about not particularly enjoying helping out friends during waking hours. It’s true that as my son gets older, he and his age-mates are better able to entertain each other. But they are also toddlers who sometimes get in wicked clenched-fist fights over toys or who melt into tears when another child picks up the toy they’d set aside. So even if you are able to sit on the sidelines, you have to be ready to pick up the referee whistle and make sure no clumps of hair get removed or skin gets dented with teeth.

When I’ve had dinner, though, and walk over to another couple’s house to sit with their sleeping cherub while they enjoy a late meal, I have no choice but to relax. There’s no laundry, no clutter I’m expected to do anything about, and I couldn’t possibly bring over our five-pound pile of junk mail to sort through. My husband is putting the boy to bed, and I’m pretty much unplugged from any responsibility relating to my domicile. Plus, I’m accruing a future date of my own during which these folks will watch our kid – and they’ll even do daytime so we can tune-up our relationship or sort through stuff in the basement. And it’s a block away, to boot!

For me, nighttime babysitting is like a reading and writing vacation. I’m too full to do yoga, and watching TV is the thing I do while my husband is around and I’m going through that junk mail pile. Emails can be addressed all day long in short snippets of relative focus. But in the monitor-hum quiet of someone else’s living room, all I got is a book, a pen and a laptop for the longer stuff that needs more than ten minutes at a time. And I can share it with the world through a wireless network whose password is “margarita.” Yee haw!

You know her — the one who says offers, Sure, she can drop by some (insert grocery item here) when you just happen to mention being out and in a bind. And of course it would be no problem to come over and watch your child while you cook or clean for the in-laws that are visiting this weekend. Her thank you notes always come on time, as do her holiday cards. Whenever you show up at her place, it’s always neat and tidy, her bathroom floor never stained with pee or littered with stray fallen hairs.

Maybe she is a myth, but I know pieces of this woman in several friends. And I don’t really have many of those pieces.

I kind of want to be the person who agrees to co-op for the other parent who’s having one health issue or family drama after another. No, I had no meeting or specific commitment other than to my writing and the prep I had to do for tutoring later and eating a healthy meal and not being stressed out. And if I’d still had a co-oping date left to switch for, I would have done it. But I don’t, and I’m not going to take this woman’s $40 substitute fee. My free time is worth so much more to me than that it seems ridiculous to accept from a friend. I know she’d sit for me in return another time, but I don’t want another time. I want the time I expected, especially since so much of my other free time — naps, evenings when my husband may or may not want hang out when I get back from tutoring — is not really mine to determine.

And guess what? I don’t really like watching other people’s kids. Friends and neighbors are great to have for babysit swaps, and my son has more fun with other kids than with just one teenage girl. It’s close and a great option to have for short stints. But if I can avoid it, I don’t want to accrue hours of time I have to spend with other kids and my kid at the same time. I get tired easily. When he was younger, my kid was extra clingy in these situations. Now he’s better with some combos and tough with others, depending on the personality mix.

But regardless of EJ’s behavior, childcare is not something I want to lock myself into having to do very often. I love playdates because I get the social interaction, too. Take away the other mom, and it’s work! One time it seemed easier to have the other child around because he wasn’t the time to compete with mine. They just entertained each other, and I addressed holiday cards (it was March).

I feel bad when my help could take off someone else’s burden, but I’m not okay with taking on one that, well, that I’m not okay taking on. I offer to help when I feel like it’s not a hardship on me or my family, when it’s on terms I feel good about. It’s not like I’ve never done anything to be thanked for; it just that my generous offers only come when I know the kick from helping is going to be greater than any challenge the favor might pose. Is that self-aware and just authoritative (as opposed to passive-agressive)? Or is it a mature self-interest or just selfishness?

Hey, offer to have me sit alone in your quiet house after you put your kid to bed, and I’m there!

A hickey, a buzz, chocolate and babysitting all in one night. Sounds like high school. But it was really my husband’s 37th birthday. And he wasn’t the one to give me the hickey.

Even though it was his special day, I decided to hand the toddler over to my husband so I could go for a run. I was shooting for 10 miles and am registered for a half-marathon in three weeks. My husband was supposed to be playing Ultimate Frisbee, but the sodden ground caused his tournament to be canceled. The following day was mother’s day, and, if history was any guide, I didn’t have much in the way of festivities (or a gift that wasn’t for the house, or probably even a card) to expect. I made my own priorities instead of waiting around to be disappointed. The incessant rain seemed to be taking a break Saturday afternoon, so I seized the opportunity for a run on the bike trail. Who wants to run 10 miles on the treadmill in the gym if there’s a spot of sun to chase?

When I got home, our son hadn’t yet napped, and it didn’t look like that was going to happen. I had agreed to babysit that night for a neighbor. If we were going to get out for a birthday dinner and back home by 7:30, we’d just have to keep the boy up and put him to bed earlier than his usual 8:30 (or 9:00, or 9:30). But while I lounged on the couch in a sweatshirt nursing him post-shower, pre-restaurant, my husband opened a note from the IRS that told him he’d forgotten to pay them what he owed them once he became an independent contractor. He was being issued a penalty. Livid, he went downstairs to search his records. I turned my attention to a volume of Best American Short Stories, and before I knew it, the boy’s eyes were closed.

After he’d stopped trying to feel me up, I knew he was truly asleep. But when we tried to wake him, he clamored for more, so I switched him to the other side to even myself out. He fell back asleep, but when I delatched him, he was so disoriented, he started sucking on the bottom half of my breast. He never loses his bearings; he always finds my nipple, but this time he was really out of it. I laughed and guided him back up to the source.

After we got him to wake up in a good mood, I went upstairs to change and gasped as I caught a glimpse in the mirror. The kid had given me a hickey. His mouth was stronger than I thought.

And so was the wine at the restaurant. I hadn’t had a full glass in a long time. Once home, I got ready for my babysitting gig with the biggest buzz I’ve had since I drank a whole bottle of Kombucha with dinner at Whole Foods another Saturday night.

And though I’d quit eating chocolate back in college because I thought it gave me a headache just like my mom (who also abstains), I recently started craving it and decided I wasn’t sensitive to it anymore. But I had a funny feeling that I couldn’t confess this retreat from purity to my mom. Before I headed to my babysitting gig, I ate a few bites of a Chocolove bar I’d bought myself (along with one for my husband, you know, for his birthday). I then walked myself and my laptop over to my neighbor’s house with not only a hidden hickey and a wine buzz but having indulged in a new vice. I felt pretty young and sneaky.

Within a few hours, what I felt was a little thirsty and tired, but I was still glad my husband was awake when I returned. It was nice to get some adult action on the couch for a change.