I'm thinking about not bouncing back...ever.

Baby C turns 5 months’ old next week. In two weeks, she starts daycare. At the same time, I go back for the second year of classes in my counseling program. As of a couple weeks ago, I have new journalism assignments. I have writing workshop requests. If I wanted to dive all the way back into the varied high-energy whirlpool that is my career, now would be the time.

But for the first time…ever?!...I’m doubting whether that is, in fact, what I want.

Which feels a little wild. For a long time, I’ve worked extremely hard. Becoming a mom obviously marked a huge transition from doing-what-I-wanted to doing-what-my-child-needed, but I think arguably an even bigger transition happened, for me, during the pandemic. That was when my life went from being A Lot But Manageable to Absolutely Crushing. It wasn’t healthy (in 2020, what was?). But what turned out to be less healthy was what happened next: After six months of intensive parenting while working, the world reopened, M went back to daycare, and instead of forcing myself to DO LESS for a while, in order to recover from all the months in which I’d done far too much—I somehow told myself that since I’d discovered I could do much more than I’d ever thought possible, I should keep doing that, from here on out, forever.

This led to a four year stretch in which I was taught, worked on multiple literary manuscripts, launched a coaching business, started a second master’s program requiring multiple three-hour commutes per week, and managed a household while raising my son as a single mom.

It actually was as ridiculous as it sounds. But that lifestyle had become my normal. Even when I had free time, even when there truly was NO REASON I should be working, I was working. J came over for dinner sometimes and lamented the existence of my laptop as if it were a drug to which I was severely addicted. Without it, he proclaimed, I would be happier, more relaxed, a better parent, and an all-around nicer person. To which I felt like cursing him out: My laptop was how I made a living. It was how I pursued my passion. How would he feel if I took away his car, his work tools, his fishing rod, his motorcycle, his baseball cards, his plants, his sneaker collection, and his Netflix account? Because that was what my laptop meant to me!

And that was his point, J replied: He had 10 activities that kept him busy and I had only one. The laptop was my everything, and it shouldn’t be. When he came in the house and saw it open on the table, he wanted to lock it away in a closet somewhere.

I thought he was crazy. But I could tell he was correct about one tiny fraction of his accusations; I was a more distracted parent when I was trying to do work at the same time. Reluctantly, I tried returning to my pre-pandemic pattern of putting the laptop away at five p.m. And the effect was immediate; my brain was able to shift much more easily from work/creative mode to parenting, household-managing, being-in-the-present-moment-with-people-I-love mode. Probably, in fact, it was putting my laptop away consistently at five o’clock that eventually opened up the free time and space I needed to decide, as M approached his 7^th birthday, that I could consider having a second child.

…a second child who I would still occasionally subject to laptop time. Sigh!