I'm about to re-join Dolly Parton and her shoulder-pad-wearing friends in the workforce. In a week and a half, I'll be going back to work. On November 1st, 12 weeks of maternity leave sounded like an eternity. I had plans - sure, I'd take care of Axel, and, while he was sleeping, I'd re-organize our house after the (mostly finished) remodel, clean it several times from top to bottom, create a snazzy filing system with pretty blue file folders, babyproof every room, and lose all the baby weight plus a few more pounds. Well, I've got a week and a half left, and my list of things to do isn't really that much shorter than it was at first. The house is still messy, according to my admittedly neurotic clean-freak standards, the files are still a jumble, and the baby-created jelly belly is still very much around my middle.
What have I done the last ten and a half weeks? Countless hours of nursing, rocking, butt wiping, doing laundry, talking to Axel about his ears and fingers and nose, with a little bit of post-remodeling unpacking and cleaning here and there. I've got ten days to get my life and house in order before I go back to work - and I know that's not going to happen. I'll be going back with a partially-organized house and life, with stacks of bills and catalogs on the desk and pacifiers scattered in random drawers and cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink in an unlocked cabinet. Some days, I don't find time to sit down and eat with two hands and a set of utensils, so why I think that I should have found time to organize the clothes in my closet by color and sleeve length, I don't know. Since I've been failing at getting much done around the house, I'm wondering how I'll be able to get things done at work - and how I'll actually get myself ready and to work on time - when I go back in just a few days.
I knew it would be hard to return to work and leave Axel - even though I'll be leaving him, at least for the first few weeks, in the very capable hands of his dad or his grandparents, or working from home with him next to me. (Note picture with my man, taken when Axel was a day old, below. Sorry it's a little old - I snap photos of my boy all day long. Sean just doesn't have the photo-worthy range of expressions that Axel does.).
What I didn't really think about, other than having some fuzzy memories of Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom covered in flour and wrestling with the vacuum cleaner, was how I would do all the stuff I'm doing now and be a mostly awake, functioning worker bee wearing something other than spit-up covered sweatpants.
Besides my slight clean-freak tendencies and desire to clean the floors on my hands and knees weekly, I'm relatively low maintenance - I don't iron; I rarely wear makeup besides mascara and lip gloss; I've never been one of those girls who shaved her legs every day; I don't care if my clothes or Axel's are covered in spit up. I guess I'll have to be even more low-maintenance if I want to hang on to more than four hours of sleep a night. Should I just resign myself to showering every three days and invest in a nice wig so I don't have to do my hair every morning? I'm a multi-tasking fiend, which used to mean reading the New Yorker and eating oatmeal while I blow dried my hair but now means folding laundry while sitting on the floor and playing with Axel and trying to eat lunch without dropping any food on Axel's head or the clean laundry. Maybe now's the time to enroll myself in some freaky scientific study and grow a third arm.
Once again, I'm turning to you, dear readers, for advice. (On a side note, how did our parents do all this without the Internet? The comments and advice I get from Babble readers, and insights from reading other blogs, have helped keep me mostly sane through this brand new mama phase.) How do you juggle babies and housework and eating and showering and work outside (or inside) of the home?
