Member-only story
Work-Life Imbalance
Dispatches from the final 2 to 20 days without a baby
I’ll have lived a hundred years before becoming a mother, and after becoming one, none of them will have mattered. Women keep warning me of a feeling I can’t imagine ever having: monotony, feeling trapped, craving more time with grown-ups, missing work and the validation of a career. My ignorant response, here in the safety of late pregnancy, is that I think we either don’t arm ourselves with enough interests, hobbies, and personal goals to enjoy a year of paid leave bestowed to us by the government or that we simply find ourselves incapable of attending to them when there’s a baby at arm’s length. They — grown-up goals — are so much more terrifying than little faces looking up at us. We can shield ourselves with their needs instead of facing our own.
But if we don’t face our own, it shows. I think of Elizabeth Strout’s daughter, who said she picked up on her mother’s frustration during the years (decades) before Strout became a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Strout raised her daughter while teaching classes at a community college and toiling away at Sackett Street, the Brooklyn writing workshop where I also toiled after I’d heard Strout had gone there. “It was just compulsion. It was just pure compulsion,” she told Terry Gross a few years ago, explaining why she never threw in the towel. “Every…
