What do you do with a two month old? Out of curiosity I typed the question in online and a search led me to a
day-in-the-life type blog post by a mother with a two month old. Great! I thought.
The blogger's day starts with a crack of dawn feed. So
far, so similar. Sol wakes up at 4am, feeds for about fifteen minutes then falls asleep until 7 or 8am. It's
pretty relaxed and there's a lot of snoozing by both of us.
At 6.30am the blogger is inexplicably trying to have a shower.
What's the
rush? I wonder. I aim to have a shower at some point during the day and so
far have a 100% success rate. Set your goals low and you shall achieve them!
7am and the mother appears to be getting ready to go somewhere. Bit eager, I think. If she's going for
an early morning walk then she must be a masochist. I don't know what it's like
in her neck of the woods, but in mine, it's so hot the earliest I leave the
house with the baby is 7pm.
Now she appears to be leaving the baby with a relative... wait, she's
going to work? Oh! From 8am to 6pm!
In that moment, I realise two things. One, that this post is a fat lot of good if you want to observe a FULL day with a two month old. Two, that the blogger has to be American. Their maternity
leave is famously rubbish. A poxy 12
weeks, I believe, compared to UK's 26 basic leave. And if you think included in that 12 weeks is the time you take off before birth, then of course by two months your time's up.
You know that whole "Make America Great Again" slogan - did
they have decent maternity leave before? If not, then it can't have been that
great. I think a humane maternity leave is so important. It's about reducing
stress for the people bringing up the next generation. And the way things are in the world, we really need the next
generations to be alright.
I delve into the blog and stumble on information about how hard it was
for this woman to have the baby in the first place. She mentions countless rounds of fertility treatment.
And I can't help it. For a moment I think, all that and she's back to work after less
than two months? What's the point of it all?
But then I also think, ah, it's in America, so she's probably
steeped in debt after all that treatment and now has to work at a meth lab all
day to pay it back. I often think how many TV plots wouldn't be possible if
America had a free national healthcare service. Okay, so in the UK it's not free either, but you do get one free chance and after that, it's only a fraction of what it costs in the States.
I finish reading the blog post. It ends pretty much the same as my day
ends, with a little baby tanking up on milk for a couple of hours before
collapsing at the breast, then carefully being carried, her arms and legs heavy
with sleep, to her cot beside our bed.
I'm not sure whether to feel admiration for the woman, or sad that her daily life has to be such a struggle. If only there was more flexibility in all societies to accommodate the realities of bringing up children. Trying to fit babies into a tidy military schedule is unnatural and stresses everyone out.
Meanwhile I've been making notes of my own first week home alone with Sol... eat, sing, sleep, eat, POO... you'll be on the edge of your seat when you read it.
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