The Transition

Recently, I've frequently been asked two questions : Are you getting any sleep? and How is the transition from working full time to being home full time going?

I admit that I was a little worried myself about that transition. Of course I was dying to be a stay-at-home mom, but I wondered if it would be hard to go from working sixty hours a week outside of the home to staying home all the time. I wondered if I'd be bored. Now that I've been home with Anna for nearly a month now, I can say with some certainty that I don't miss my job at all. But then last night I dreamed that I was back in my classroom and I'd lost the ability to get control of my class. One more reason I don't miss my job. I'm not bored at all, although I do occasionally get fidgety, and I've learned that while some things make me feel like a lazy slob, others help me pass the time. For example, unless it's after midnight, watching Oprah makes me feel like a slob, but watching episodes of Alias all day doesn't. Just another one of my idiosyncrasies I guess.

In fact in some ways I'm having a harder time with the identity aspect of all of this. I have spent so much time and energy defining myself as someone who doesn't have kids that it feels really weird to say that I have a child or I'm a mom. I'm more comfortable saying that I have a baby (again, another part of my weirdness). It feels a lot like when I turned thirty and I would sometimes forget, when people asked me how old I was that I wasn't in my twenties anymore.

I've also noticed that women at Church seem to have an easier time talking to me. Now that could be because a week before we brought Anna home, I was called to be in the Relief Society presidency, making me more visible. But most people talk to me about my baby. I get the feeling that it wasn't that they didn't want to talk to me before, but they just didn't know how. That bothers me a little bit. It makes me appreciate all my friends with children even more because all y'all figured out how to include me even though I didn't have children. Perhaps I should teach a mini-lesson in Relief Society on the simple phrase "Tell me about yourself." I've found that it can wonderfully bridge perceived gaps.

The biggest shock for Dan and me has been the realization that there's a lot of criticism we need to take back. I mean, we didn't spend lots of time criticizing people with kids, but more than once we both wondered how hard is it really to have kids? So, now we know that it is hard and we take back every negative or judgmental thing we ever said. Well, maybe not everything. I'm still pretty certain that I'm not going to feed Anna sandwiches during sacrament meeting, but then again who knows.

As for whether I'm getting enough sleep, the answer is probably no. And this is the hardest thing for me. I do my best to take naps during the day, but I always feel a bit chastised when people tell me I need to sleep when she does. Because seriously, how many moms actually took a nap every single time their first baby did? I know that once child number 2 and number 3 show up, most moms probably wish they had taken more naps, but occasionally I do need to wash bottles so that I can feed her and nap time is the best time to shower. But I was foolish enough to think that sleeping while she did would be easy and that this sleep schedule would only last for the first week or so. I also figured that my biggest obstacle to exercising would be finding a way to do it with Anna, not my own exhaustion. So please tell me that I'm not crazy for not lying down every time I put Anna down. And on that note, I think I'll go try to get in a nap before she wakes up.