Tagged: SAHM
Staying At Home: I Guess I’m Batman In This Situation?
I can’t remember when it started… Maybe last week? It began with a whimper, and has become a full-scale nuclear meltdown. Separation anxiety. What. The. Fuck? My sweet, even-tempered little boy has started channeling Harvey Dent in the last couple of days. Most of the time, he’s fine. We hang out, he laughs, we do stuff, all is right in the world. But then, I take a step out of the room. I go to the bathroom. I LEAVE THE HOUSE. And he’s no longer cutie-patootie Aaron Eckhart being all mild-mannered and trying to woo Maggie Gyllenhaal. He’s that weird half-skull Terminator baby that’s going into business with the Joker. The REVENGE business. Continue reading
Staying At Home: You Can’t Tell Your Toddler To Fuck Off.
Before I was a stay-at-home mom, I worked in the restaurant industry for years. I did a little bit of everything. I waited tables, bar-tended managed, manned the take-out, booked bands… Pretty much every position except cook and delivery driver. I started working at my last job at the tender, non-back hurting age of 25. The restaurant and I had a deep love/abiding hatred for each other. I loved making double my rent in one night. I loved the fast pace, and the fact that it was always changing. I had regulars, fostered friendships and had all of the fun. At the same time, I hated people. Nothing makes you more scornful of the general public than having to wait on them. People are terrible. Oh, the horror stories I could tell. Continue reading
Staying At Home: It’s Not All Bon-Bons and Soaps
I never intended to be a stay-at-home mom. I have been working since I was eighteen, and the thought of stopping to stay home all day with a baby was terrifying to me. “I’d be so bored!” I would cry! “No one does that anymore!” I’d tell people. Stay-at-home mothering was right up there with moving back in with your parents at thirty in my life. The shame! The horror!
While I was pregnant, I kept my nighttime bar-tending job, working eleven hour shifts right up until I was nine months pregnant and people starting making serious comments about me giving birth while mixing a cocktail. When I was asked what would happen after the baby came, I was optimistic. “Oh, I’m going to take five weeks off, and then I’ll be back to keep working my shifts. No big deal.” And I did. I was the crankiest, most irritated bartender in Richmond, serving college kids their red bull and vodkas with the bitchiest stink face I had because they would get to sleep off their hangovers while the only thing I got to sleep off was an hour or two of not being vomited on. I schlepped on for about four months, until I had to finally admit to myself and my husband that I was harboring a pretty terrible case of postpartum depression that I was trying to mask by drinking a lot while at work and going to target almost every day I wasn’t working.
Once I got some help with my depression, I cut back to one night a week at the bar for mental health and settled into a fairly decent routine with my kiddo, who was starting to be less of a screaming worm with appendages and more like a smiling human who only screamed intermittently. Around this time, my husband started a new hobby which evolved into a new business. He was working seven days a week and when he wasn’t working, he was holding down the fort while I went to work. After a few months of him working all the time, we realized a couple of things. Monetarily, we were doing OK. We certainly weren’t showering in Perrier and eating fancy dinner every night, but we were holding our own. Secondly, the money I was bringing in from my one night of work a week was pretty much equal to what my husband was trying to do on the two and a half days that he wasn’t at his real job. It seemed pretty clear that my job was becoming a moot point.
Put Your Damn Pants On! 