Sick Days & Working Mamas

My girl is sick, and I'm not even mad.  She's at that sweet spot, just ill enough to not be allowed to go to the babysitter's, but not so ill that we can't enjoy spending the day together.  

There is quite a lot of sleeping going on among the diaper-wearing crowd here today.

It has been sweet, crusty eyes and crustier noses and all.  

Yesterday, I cried when I picked her up from the sitter's.  She hadn't taken her afternoon nap, which meant that she had been awake for hours, and the babysitter got to just hang out and play with her.  She said they had a great time.  And I was sad, because I wished it were me.

The decision to go back to work wasn't really a decision that I liked, on a day-to-day way of looking at things.  I don't love dropping my baby off every morning, and picking her up in the afternoons, even if its just for 5 hours.  It makes me sad.  It hurts my mama heart and leaves me with morning tears and afternoon jealousy.  It doesn't matter that her babysitter loves her, and takes almost-as-good-as-mama care of her.  It doesn't matter that RG gets excited to see the babysitter's little boy, and that they miss each other when they're apart.  It doesn't matter that she's learning social skills and building friendships.

It only matters that I'm sad.

At least, that's what gets a hold of me in the mornings and afternoons.  I know she's in good hands and all of that, but I wish she were in my hands.  

But.

But.

I hate the "but".

But the "but" is, that's not what we're doing.  We've decided that, for our family, in this moment, the best thing is for me to keep working on my PhD, and for Riley to go to the babysitter's for a bit each day in order for me to actually get work done.  As well, babies don't know much about Deterministic Operations Research, so she's useless to me when I have to teach.

I have to keep reminding myself, there is no alternate universe.  At least, not one where we "are independently wealthy and I get to stay home and take care of the baby & run my online sewist shop".  And there is no alternate universe where we waited until after I graduate to start a family.  Oh, and the old classic "if we had stayed in PA and I had not gone to grad school and Handsome had found a great job and we built a house on a hill behind one of our parents and lived happily ever after"?  Yeah, that alternate reality doesn't exist either.  No matter how much my imagination dwells there, those stories aren't real.

So I have to pull my mind back to this reality, to this set of circumstances.  I have to make the decision to not beat myself up for not staying home with baby, like I thought I would, when I thought things would be different.  I have to accept that things are the way that they are, and then find the sunny side in that.  Because, apparently, God hasn't called me be a stay-at-home mom the way I thought He would *cue heart breaking*.  No, he's called me to the nerds of the world, the people who know party tricks that their calculators can do, and who find significant value in pressing 9-0-START instead of 1-3-0-START on the microwave.

This is my world, my reality.  And while these sweet-spot sick days give me a little reprieve from it, its not where I am.  I need to stop fighting that monster, the one that I've built out of guilt and disappointment, and just let him go.  Maybe that way I won't cry quite so much, and I'll actually get more work done.

<3 M.