From Here to Autonomy

Passing the Gymboree Test

Last week I signed up Olive for Gymboree; actually I guess I signed both of us up. Weekends have become my time with Olive, given she's with Daddy full-time during the week. He gets on his new custom cross-bike, helps me tuck Liv into her stroller and sees us on our way. Previous Saturdays I followed her around the house, took her to the park, ran errands, read to her and tried to coax her into taking a nap. I craved more structured time with her, where she could be around other kids, where she could play age appropriate games and stand on things meant for little people.

Liv is on the cusp of two of the Gymboree-defined age cohorts. The group leader suggested we go for the older-kid session, due to her inclination to climb on everything and verbally refuse to do things. As soon as I get her shoes and jacket off she runs to a climbing structure. She attempts to run up the attached slide and succeeds. When the group leader starts to sing, a subtle call to parents to corral our youngsters and engage in a group activity, I attempt to nudge her toward the center of the room, but she'll have none of it.

After a group song, the group leader sets a large, padded cylinder across two brackets and invites the kids to walk across. Liv wants to go first. Then Liv wants to go again. Then Liv wants to go again.

"Let's let Ella go now, Liv," I say, referring to the youngster standing next to us with her dad.

"Zane is going now Sweetie. Let Zane go."

"Will you let William go? Let's let William get on."

Later, Liv spots Ella with two balls and makes her way over to her to relieve her of one. I know I am supposed to apologize to Ella's Dad for Liv's presumption. And he does his part as well.

"Share your ball, Ella," he says.

Liv bumps into a little boy.

"Oh please do excuse us!" I say.

Liv slides down a makeshift slide and then attempts to walk up it when Haley is trying to go down.

"You've had your turn, Liv. Now let the other kids go."

Liv walks up to a girl and half-waves.

"Wave back at Olive," her Mom says.

"Say hello, Liv!" I say.

The group leader lays out a parachute, blows bubbles into the air, and invites all the parents and their toddler to join her there. Liv stands on the center of the parachute, watching the bubbles float over her head and slowly drop to the floor.

"Come join Mama, Liv! C'mon! C'mon! C'mon! C'mon! Cmon!" I start singing the parachute song to the pretend child in my lap. I am the sucker who keeps clapping my hands when the clapping stops and everyone places their hand on their heads. The only other person whose hands are not on her head is Liv.

"Bub-boos … Bub-boos." She says to the air.

The class is already ending. It was built to be short, like a child's attention span. I'm exhausted and watch Liv run across the room to another apparatus. I know it is my job to follow her.

"Come get shoes on, Liv."

She shakes her head no.

Ella and her Dad are about to leave.

"Say goodbye to Olive," Ella's Dad says. Ella weakly waves. Olive stares back,

"Say bye-bye Liv.

Say bye-bye!

Say bye-bye!

Say bye-bye!

Say bye-bye!

Say bye-bye!

OK, wave bye-bye!

Wave bye-bye!

Look at Ella!

Wave bye-bye!

I tell her there's juice near her shoes; if she follows me to them she can have some. I lied. Before she discovers this is the case I grab her, put her on my lap and put on her shoes.

We both need a nap. Once home the phone rings; it's my husband calling from the top of some peak he just climbed with his new bike.

"How'd she do?" he asks.

I say: "We did fine."

Rituals

When I was a kid, we had a post-Thanksgiving ritual of setting up the Christmas decorations. This had to occur the Friday and weekend after Thanksgiving. My Mom is a pack rat so this was no small chore. The kids had to cart huge boxes in from the garage and storage room; boxes full of tcotchkes--Christmas tree ashtrays, red and green felt wall-hangings, macrame santas, and ornaments. Hundreds of ornaments. Ornaments were Christmas currency in my extended family. No adult walked into a family gathering without ornaments for the kids. My aunts were very craftsy and often made our ornaments. Each one we received had our name and the year inscribed on it.

Since Olive turned one, I've been thinking about how even the most seemingly mundane traditions are developed, and how they create meaning later in life. This weekend, I pulled out a box that my mother sent me of all of the ornaments I had received as a child. Had she not sent this box I would have nothing to put on our Christmas tree--the one we have yet to purchase.

"This is your deal," Jesse said to me. Meaning, because I'm the one who celebrates Christmas in our household, I am in charge of the tree. But this really wasn't true. Even though Jesse is Jewish he does have a say, because anything impacting the house immediately falls into his bucket. If I weren't a Gentile I would have recused myself from holiday decorating altogether. All these years I've lived on my own I've never had a Christmas tree. It made no sense to buy one, as I always traveled to my mother's or my sister's house during the holidays. But this year is different. We've decided to stay home for Christmas, and I want Olive to be as excited as I was as a child by the ritual and spectacle of holiday decorating. Sure, she may be only a year old, but we started early in my childhood home. Very early.

A part of the decorating ritual that I did not like growing up was setting up the Christmas Tree, or more accurately, "building" the tree. The trunk was a series of camouflaged tubes that connected to each other and was slipped vertically into a small stand, followed by the branches labeled A through F. Dad did the high branches. Next came the tinsel, which Mom did, then the lights, which Dad did. Then came the ornaments, which all of the kids did, with coaching from my mother:

"Sweetie, don't put the heavy ones on the looser branches ..."

"Put the broken ones toward the back."

"Put the ones Aunt Mary made for you there..."

"Let your brother put his on!"

This part took an hour or more.

As a kid I didn't realize that people actually BOUGHT real trees. For years now I've fantasized about getting a real tree, but Jesse feared that wasn't sustainable. I had to agree.

This weekend I researched artificial trees and was shocked to find that they now come pre-lit--a feature that has probably been around for years. There were so many options. Jesse did more research on PVC, a common chemical in artificial trees and decided that the off-gassing involved with an artificial tree was worse than the sustainability issues he had with buying a live tree.

"We'll buy locally," he said, "and we'll compost it." On the one hand I was relieved--we'd live out my fantasy of having a real tree in the living room. On the other, more practical, hand, I was worried. We'd now need to buy lights and a proper tree stand. I'd have to keep the tree hydrated every day. Would Olive pick off pine needles and leave them in random corners of the house?

Jesse and I debated the timing of purchasing the tree. My take: I leave on a business trip tomorrow--no time like the present. Jesse's more thoughtful take: Let's buy the accessories now and wait until you get back before buying the tree. It made sense, but it poked a hole in my ritual of having the house set up the weekend after Thanksgiving. Granted it was a long-neglected ritual, but I still kept it close.

Jesse didn't understand that without a tree we couldn't have a family picture--another piece of my holiday fantasy once Olive was old enough of having a yearly family photograph embedded in a lovely holiday card. I'm not religious, but in the past I've been religious about sending holiday cards, until about five years ago when the business took over every crevice of my free time. I gave them up begrudgingly and temporarily forgot them. Last year Jesse reasoned with me that our birth announcements added up to enough snail mail correspondence with family and friends to hold us over until the next year. I told Jesse of my plan this year to get a picture done in time to send out cards before the holidays.

"No way," Jesse said. "You are cramming in way too much! You are traveling up to the holidays. And I won't have the time to do it."

"I'll make the time," I said.

I totally understood where Jesse was coming from, but I felt like I'd run out of excuses for not doing the things I loved to do around the holidays. I feel ready to embrace them again. Not because I have the time, but because I want Liv to be surrounded by what I had as a kid--the feeling that for a few weeks time stood still. No one had to be anywhere else. Family and friends meant everything.

Concerns of a Mom returning to work

This is the last weekend of my maternity leave, which I've anticipated for a long time. I've been planning the timing of things in my head and practicing on the breast pump--which for all its necessary function also is a bit dehumanizing. Even as I rely on them, I'm a bit repulsed by the pump, the plastic milk storage bags, these poor facsimiles of maternal role replacement. I know, I know, many women have done this before me; broken the seal of the little bubble of constancy created around them and their child. It has to be done sometime, but I still find myself recoiling from the inevitable pop.

I remember asking a woman in my office who had recently returned from maternity leave how she felt to be back. She was glad to be working again but confessed that she cried dropping her son off at daycare. A friend of mine who returned to work three months ago said she cried every day for two weeks very morning, after dropping off her daughter with a shared nanny. I'm lucky: My husband will be staying at home with my daughter--no emotional drop-offs; no wondering if she's clean or scared. I don't imagine myself crying, but rather digging in to work like I've done for the past 17 years. Work has a way of helping me temporarily forget things. But I worry: what if I don't temporarily forget? What if I find it too easy to forget?

I must confess, I miss being focused on things for longer than three minutes, with no distractions.

My child has not been away from me for 3.5 months. There was one day when Daddy took her out thinking he would come home sooner, but, amazed that she took a bottle in her sleep, he stayed out a whopping six hours. Aside from that anomalous day we've been apart no longer than three hours. Never has a relatively short eight hour work day seemed like such a hurdle.

We've tried to get her to take a bottle (asleep or awake) for two months, and we have had no luck aside from the aforementioned "dream feed". Sometimes she screams during our attempts; most times she plays with the nipple of the bottle, thinking we're offering her a new toy, happy to chew on it for a few seconds but ultimately rejecting it. We've offered the bottle with Mommy out of sight, with Mommy in the room, with Mommy subbing it in for the breast during a nursing, with experienced Grandmas and Aunts helming the effort, with Daddy begging her to consider, with bottles that look like boobs, with bottles that look like pacifiers, and with bottles that look like bottles, but nada.

We're now resorting to what friends tell us is the final, most effective method: Mommy goes back to work and makes the baby take a bottle or starve. This option is more than unsettling.

The babe also doesn't like to sleep in her crib. The past three months has elapsed over a long series of hand-offs between me and my husband; and if you are the one she falls asleep on, you must transition her to the nearest bed-like surface. Sometimes this can be a crib, or co-sleeper, or reclined baby swing or couch. The transition is done with the grace and precision of an experienced tai chi practitioner, as the babe cannot feel any slackening, dropping, or fidgeting or she will wake up.

This on-demand service will be impossible to continue when I go back to work, including the days when I'm working from home. In other words, unless we get this kid trained to fall asleep on her own, in her own bed, my husband will be the sole set of arms for eight-hour stretches of time. I've been praying for him and reminding him that, in retrospect, these times pass by all too quickly.

There were short stretches during my leave when I took a work call, sat in on an important meeting, responded to email, jotted down some thoughts I had about something business-related. All of these moments were all-encompassing. I know myself, and while I often multitask, I cannot integrate mothering with working. Both must be done exclusively during the times I've designated for them.

This, in itself, is a mixed blessing because it forces me to keep these realms separate, but it also forces them to compete. The work side can no longer sneak in minutes, that turn into hours, pursuing unscheduled ideas and entering spontaneous discussions. All of my spontaneity will be paradoxically planned; hemmed into my work day. The Mom side has to acknowledge the future I'm building at its short-term expense. I'll miss some milestones of my daughter's development and catch her at the crankier end of the day.

And I'll abandon someone I once left before, years ago, with whom I'd become reacquainted over the past three months. She knows how to sit in a room without looking at the clock. She forgets appointments. She sometimes forgets to bring her cell phone with her when she's out. She calls her friends in the middle of the day and apologizes if she catches them working. She finds joy in crazy things like changing diapers. She's not hankering to go places. She gets weepy from looking at babies, particularly ones she has to leave.   

Am I a Bad Mother?

Am I a bad mother if:

• I'm typing this while an infant is feeding on my right boob?
• I forgot to ask you to wash your hands before holding the baby?
• I stick a finger in her mouth to suck when she's tantruming and there's no Purell in sight?
• I pee while I'm wearing her?
• I eat while I'm wearing her, and you can find granola crumbs and errant drops of the frozen yogurt in the folds of her neck?
• I have a three wet-fart rule? No change of diaper until I hear at least three.
• I file nails badly? My baby has scissorhands and wakes up from naps looking like she was in a cat fight.
• I drink a glass of wine and nurse less than two hours afterward?
• I'd rather go back to my old size than keep the pounds on my hips recommended to nurse optimally?
• I can't remember the words to a lullabye to save my life?
• I sing Bob Marley instead?
• I sing the same verse from Three Little Birds over and over?
• I hum Tori Amos' "Putting the Damage On" as backup?
• I request that you let me put on a bra, and maybe some mascara, next time you decide to shoot pics of me with the baby and post them on Facebook?
• I haven't planned where we'll live in five years so that we can be in a good school district?
• I let her watch Burn Notice when I saw that staring at the TV calmed her down?
• I let her have all the immunizations recommended by her pediatrician without an interrogation?
• I use disposable diapers?
• I pray that she doesn't inherit my hair?
• I still use my picture in my Facebook profile and not hers?

The Practical New Mother

I struggle to remember what for years I've heard during the safety instructions on flights--something about securing your air mask before attending to your child's...

I try to remember this as I clean hummus that has lodged in the fold of my daughter's neck. Sure, I could have waited for her to have fallen asleep, but after two aborted attempts and her long bout of hiccups I hedged my bets and, holding the baby with one arm, started to pull immediately edible items from the refrigerator and cupboards: hummus, crackers, yogurt, and a block of cheese.

I find a knife and with the hand not holding the baby, slice off a chunk of white cheddar. It's too large for the delicate wheat craker I've managed to liberate from its package--it crumbles while I attempt to nibble, and half of it falls to the floor. I negotiate with myself: Pick it up now or "remember" it later. There are many things that I've opted to "remember" around my house. Things that H-band later finds and tries to question me about. He knows by now that if the item fell during a particularly challenging period with the baby he's going to get a look from me. A look that says, "Don't." He's learning to pick his battles, and I'm learning to pick mine.

I find a cocktail sauce spoon--the only clean utensil in the drawer, and start to eat hummus directly from the tub in which it was bought. I feel a little guilty. Years ago when I moved to New York City after college, I used to eat my leftovers right out of the Tupperware. I had two roommates from Beverly Hills (with whom I was connected through a friend of a mutual friend) who used to watch me do this and question why I didn't spoon my leftovers on a plate. I told them, why dirty another dish? They looked at me funny--Midwestern girl...never learned to eat leftovers properly. I rationalized that I was simply being practical, efficient. Like I'm rationalizing now.

I finish my lunch standing up and put away anything that I can wrap/clean/close with one hand. The crackers remain out of their package. H-band will question me about this as well, and I will tell him I left them out so that he wouldn't have to open a container. I'm saving him time. Again, practical and efficient.

When you learn your child isn't the most beautiful in the world

She was when we left for New Mommy Pilates class--the most beautiful baby in the world. The stork bite marks and baby acne were temporary. Hopefully we've prevented future scratches on her by filing her nails while she nursed. When she smiles, she smiles more brightly than any other human. No one has as beautiful a smile as she.

It's Day Two of our 10-day Post-Natal Pilates series, meant to help Mommy from continuing to piss herself 20 minutes after drinking a glass of water, and to help put her back in her skinny jeans (or, at least her fat jeans). When people ask her why she's going to Pilates she says it's to get out of the house and to have some quality time with her baby girl. But really, it's to fit back into her jeans.

That doesn't mean she doesn't appreciate quality time, but she knows full-well that most quality time with the baby occurs when she's half naked with a breast pump on one boob, her baby girl on the other, not when she's laying with a yoga ball between her knees, tucking in her tummy and praying that she won't wet herself.

Liv isn't too excited about class today she prefers to keep sleeping; she screams when Mommy puts her into her carrier and locks her into the car seat. She screams when Mommy gets off the highway and finds herself stuck in traffic due to an accident ahead. She screams the whole time that Mommy lugs her 500-lb portable car seat into the Pilates studio, apologizing profusely when the seat accidentally dings a wall and hits a cactus.

Mommy is particularly proud of herself, because she's brought Liv to class early, as was requested, so she could nurse her screaming, hungry baby right before. The thinking makes sense: feed baby now and let her sleep for the next hour. One other woman is going to be in the class, though she hasn't yet showed. Mommy feels quite proud of herself for managing to get her baby to calm down and nurse peacefully.

As class is about to start, the other mom arrives, also lugging a "portable" car seat. She looks fairly calm; "she hides it well," Mommy thinks. She sets up next to the bouncy chair where Liv lies calm, peaceful, and beautiful.

She places her little boy, clad in a midnight blue velour jumper, into the bouncy chair, where the class baby sitter could play with him. I'm not sure if this is a proper word to use to describe this baby, who is Asian, perhaps Phillippino, like his mother, but darker, like gooey caramel, and his face as smooth as if his caramel skin was stretched taught over the most perfect, round apple. He is stunning.

Mommy figures he must be older than Liv.

"When was your Little Guy born?" I ask.

She tells me. After digging around for more specifics I glean that he's five hours older than Liv. Hah, he's had plenty of time to round himself out. Liv is still a newborn for God's sake.

As we start our stretches, the Little Guy coos and Liv sleeps.

"He's beautiful," the instructor says to the other woman, and not in that way that everyone is supposed to say it to new parents. She says it with a tinge of disbelief, as in "How in the world could a baby turn out to be THAT beautiful?" I smile and wait for a reciprocal comment about my sleeping beauty, but there isn't one.

"You must just look at your baby all the time," the instructor says to the other woman.

"I do," She and I both reply.

Near the end of the session, Little Guy has graduated from cooing to crying, and his mother has to stop to attend to him. I feel proud now to see Liv still conked out in her bouncy chair, nonethewiser.

I can't help but notice the Little Guy's cries--not exactly lusty, but more like little "wah's", almost polite.

"Liv will sleep though anything," I say.

"Uh oh," the Babysitter says ominously,"She's waking up."

I'm doing leg lifts and secretly mouthing to myself--"Please-let-me-get-to-my-left-side-please-let-me-get-to-my-left-side." I start picking up the pace, prompting the instructor to remind me to slow down.

"Didn't you nurse right before class?" I'm asked. I nod my head yes.
 
Then, it erupts. The babysitter provides 1.5 seconds of warning.

"Here she goes," she says.

"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

I know that cry. It says, "You thought that 10 minutes of nursing would cut it? You silly, silly woman. I hate you Mommy! I hate you!"

"She's got lungs," I say, somehow needing to explain why my child could be a military weapon.
 
"Let's stop here," the instructor says. I get up and go to Liv.

"And you'll want to change that diaper," the babysitter says, "she just made a big one." For a second I think she's talking about me.

"She's quite the pooper," I say, inexpicably acknowledging that my child has a digestive system.

While the instuctor and the babysitter leave the room, I opt for the triage process for when she's screaming that I've honed over the past six weeks: Left boob, diaper change, right boob.

The other woman and I nurse our little ones, sharing notes on feeding and sleeping. She neatly packs her boobs in and places the Little Guy, now cooing, into his carrier.

"Maybe I'll see you next time," she says on her way out.

I smile back, not realizing that Liv has unlatched and milk is spewing out onto her face. I've forgotten my burp cloth in the diaper bag across the room and elect to collect milk in one hand, attempting to drop it into Liv's mouth and missing.

The instructor comes back to find I'm still there and leaves me to finish up. "Just close the door on your way out," she says. I nod and wave with my elbow. She doesn't know what I know is about to happen, looking down at Liv writhing. She will not be soothed today with extra boobage. She's tense, and my nipple is just a finger in the dyke.

She stays attached to me for 20 minutes and I start to get nervous--will the instructor come back to teach another session and find me here, milk stained and helpless? I apologize to Liv and pack her screaming into the baby carrier, realizing I've forgotten the "diaper" portion of my process.

"F&*$ it," I say to myself and shuffle back to my car.

Liv screams most of the way back home. I try to make up for it by offering up more boobs. She'll nurse for a while, then fall asleep. And then H-band will come home and ask me what smells and ask me why I didn't change Liv's diaper. And I'll say I forgot and please don't lecture me. And he'll change his cooing daughter and remind me that she screams because she's wet.

But for now I'll look at her, and she'll take a break from nursing, look at me, and smile. It's the most beautiful smile in the world. From the most beautiful baby in the world.

My New Venture: Olive Des Jardins Markman

 

This post has been a work in progress since September 16, two days after Olive was born. Every day I added a paragraph to the account of her expedient birth (four hours all-told of labor; I'm told I'm an anomaly), of the range of emotions that followed, of my struggle to back away from the computer (which c'mon people, why the hell not browse the Internet while nursing?). And every day, a new distraction that has kept me from finishing this post. I have several versions, each with a new start. Today, I finally said, to hell with it. Just start writing, and once you have a semblance of a schedule and more than five minutes to devote substantive thought toward a more organized post THEN I can get all prosy.

H-band just asked me how I'm feeling. I'm feeling good. Relieved and grateful to the point of tears that when I look at Liv I see the universe has delivered well past my hope for a healthy baby. And I'm feeling like I'm living in molasses. Every accomplishment--whether it's eating lunch or just getting dressed--requires a plan, and is often thwarted. I endeavor to return to my cup of yogurt, or finish flossing, and often get sidetracked. I often feel half-done, and distracted by this little girl when she struggles to focus on me. I stare at her and realize that the day is already over.

Staring at Liv is perhaps the most inefficient thing I've ever done. There's no multitasking involved, and it could be a while before she realizes that the face attached to the boobs belongs to Mom. But I've set a new goal that I intend to reach: When she finally can focus her little eyes on me I want to be looking back.

Pregnancy Journal, Week 36: Working with my feet up

A friend of mine called me from New York. We talked for a while about his new job--I may be one of the few people who enjoys discussing with my friends the intricacies of their day to day work.

He asked me, so how are you?

I had to preface my response with a disclaimer,

"Nothing's wrong," I said. "But things are different." My friend probed to determine if I was unhappy.

"Nope," I said. "I'm just getting used to this change." I felt inarticulate, like when I had nightmares as a kid and my mom came into my room and asked me what I was afraid of, and I didn't know. One time I told her, "I'm feeling something skinny; a skinny string." I still get the sensation, but I don't know what it means.

By "change" I think I mean all that has shifted since becoming pregnant. For years I've been told about how the focus of energy shifts when you become a parent. I've held off on my decision to have children knowing this shift occurs. 

But even knowing that I am supposed to slow the centrifugal force that has tied me to a grinding schedule for so long, I find that I still give myself a spin or two to stay in motion, even during times of physical exhaustion. I wonder if I do this out of habit; being in motion is all that I know. Or because the slowdown scares me; all this momentum, what would it take to start up again? What if I fall in love with slow? What if slow feels like a skinny string?

A trusted friend--a powerhouse, even to other powerhouses--tells me that her desire to work, to achieve, didn't change when she had her son, but her reason for working did.

"I did everything because of him," she said.

Some might bristle at that thought, especially since working women are encouraged to have their careers "for themselves". But some of us have been working "for ourselves" for a very, very long time, at the risk of having no perspective and losing the meaning behind what we do. For me, the thought of working for someone else is liberating; it opens possibilities. It bends the rules I set in my mind of the way work must be.

Still, the rules run deep. My business partner said to me last week that if I may not want to bother commuting these last few weeks before the baby is born. Makes sense: an hour-long commute (on a good day) is hardly safe or desirable should I go into labor a few weeks early. After five years of working together (two of those virtually) she knows the work will get done anywhere. But I struggle to take her up on her suggestion. I've always valued physical, tangible presence. Presence is being in motion.

Another co-worker suggested that I use the couch she has in her cube--something she's integrated into her space for extreme back issues. I thanked her and wondered, when would I think to put my feet up? My first job out of college, when my boss traveled I'd sneak cat naps in her office. Why was it so much easier to acknowledge exhaustion when I was 21?

At the BlogHer conference I promised my colleagues and husband that I would put my feet up regularly. It took my husband physically guiding me back to my hotel room 14 hours after I started the day to do what I'd promised. As I sat there, propped by pillows, feet up against the wall, tired and restless, I lamented that it was still so early--I was leaving first thing in the morning and still hadn't seen or done everything I'd wanted to do.

I am hardly a sadomasochist or born with more energy than others. I just don't know otherwise. I suppose I will learn. And I will learn how to channel that energy where it needs to go. And rather than look upon these offers of support suspiciously, I will learn to put my feet up and note that there are moments that we work and moments that we work FOR.

And that skinny string that keeps us tethered to a life in which we've done very well won't break.

Pregnancy Journal Entry #1: Unintended insults by H-band

Really I shouldn't complain--he's been unbelievably supportive. But there are a few zingers:

--Wow, look at that happy trail!

--Linea negra what? No I'm pretty sure that's a happy trail.

--I'll just assume that was one of the "mood swings" they mentioned in the book.

--I thought you started losing hair AFTER pregnancy.

--It's OK, Sweetie. We'll work it off together.

--No really, let ME make the meals when she starts eating.

--I'm not trying to make you feel bad; I'm sure that having gas is perfectly normal. I'm just amazed there's room for so much air in your tummy when you already have a baby in there.

--I'm just enjoying them now, while I have them.

Women's work?

Part of my experimentation with my new neighborhood involved trying a new place for a mani-pedi. This didn't come with a small amount of apprehension; a good mani-pedi place is hard to find.

I got comfortable in my chair, settling into the warm pool of water at my feet. An Asian man--not older than 35--lifted my right hand.

"What shape?"

"Short and square," I replied.

"This color on your hands and feet?" he asked, holding up the bottle of deep red that I had picked out when I walked in.

"Please."

I watched this man study my cuticles and start trimming away at my nails. This was most certainly a first for me--having a man give me a mani-pedi. I've seen more men come to salons to receive services, but never had I seen a man giving them before.

I noticed my judgements: Can this guy do a good job? Will he bungle the polish? I watched him work, when normally I would sit back and zone out.

But why would a man who's trained to give manicures do a bad job? This incident made me think about work, and more specifically, women's work versus men's work. What kind belongs to whom anymore?

____________________________________________


I hand H-band a piece of notebook paper with a list of tasks.

"For the week," I say to him, dubious that he would internalize my requests.

"Yep, thanks."

"What are you doing today?"

"Got some work out back, some shopping, and a call at lunchtime," he says.

I'm uneasy with his answer, "But what about the list? When will you get to the list?"

I wonder if, since leaving his company, he'll be efficient with his time, or productive. When we both worked full-time we divided tasks accordingly: He did household tasks like the dishes and most of the cooking. I paid the bills and planned things like travel and dinner parties. I gravitated toward things in the future; he handled things as they came up.  Now he was taking on everything at home: the immediate, the planned, and, when the baby comes, the primary caregiving.

I remind myself that he's good at this. I come home, and he's made dinner. I know that with our daughter he will do what comes naturally and keep her safe, fed, and loved. But I can't help myself: I plan.

"When will you call the insurance people?" I ask. "Will you hang the pictures today?" "Who are you meeting with today?" I want to make sure he really wants to do this. And I have to ensure he's structured, that he's in movement, that he still thinks of his future.

I need to watch him work because I question his instincts in this realm, even when they are more highly honed than my own.