Notes from Maternity Leave

Have I reminded you lately to do as I say, not as I do?

For – it cannot be ignored or understated – a chasm has opened up between the stated premise of this blog and my lived reality. What I say: travel the world, read about it, and see it anew. What I do: stay home, read to escape, and filter everything through my own worldview.

I’m finally fully vaccinated, and I live in a city where 2020’s curbside cadaver trucks and tent hospitals have yielded to a vaccine supply that surges ahead of demand. My friends and colleagues are dining indoors, flying cross-country for pitches, and going to house parties again.

And yet.

The world still roils with COVID.

I’m temporarily untethered from my corporate job.

Kip’s need to feed and sleep is near-constant.

And Finnegan has a pair of once-fragile lungs that I’m loathe to put to the test.

So I remain, sometimes reluctantly and other times resolutely, in the winter of my life.

At least it’s a peaceful, beautiful winter.

I have staring contests with Kip – long stretches of time when he looks up at me searchingly with his dad’s dark eyes. We spend hours burrowing into the warmth of my bed. I feed him, I burp him, I try to stop him from craning his head towards whatever show I’m binge-streaming on a laptop half-obscured by bibs and blankies. Gurgles, coos, and the sounds of Chicago PD firefights form the soundtrack of my days.

When Kip sleeps, I have daily “porch picnics” with Finnegan. We sit outside our front door, a partitioned plate dappled with his unconventional breakfasts – sausages, crackers, cashews, and baby carrots – on the brick steps between us. Together, we observe the lazy rhythms of our Flatbush street. Kids ride bikes, mailmen make their rounds, and neighbors sweep the sidewalk. I use the promise of chocolate to try to bribe Fig to say hi. So far, it hasn’t worked. Food doesn’t motivate my son the way it motivates me.

I video chat with my mom, who spends hours merrily following along with the minutiae of Finnegan’s day. They say cheers and clank their respective glasses of “bubble water” (also known as seltzer) against laptop screens. She itemizes all the food in her refrigerator, to his endless delight. He instructs her to eat a banana, no, oatmeal, no, cereal, and she gamely downs three meals in quick succession. They hang up with a “love hug,” which she launches from her log house in the Ontario wilderness and he catches in our Brooklyn apartment.

I try to appreciate it all. To notice and revel in the slow, tender, togetherness while it lasts. It’s not in my nature – living in the moment has never come easy to me – but I’m trying.

But, all that trying aside, the urge for going still nags at me. I crave new surroundings, novelty for novelty’s sake, and a break from the monotony that, while lovely, is monotony nonetheless.

Tomorrow, I’m going to get the travel I’ve been yearning for, albeit in a very different package than my previous trips. We’re piling into a not-at-all-mini minivan and taking a slow road trip north to my mom’s place.

There, in a forested locale even more cloistered from COVID than our home, we’ll do the same things we do here. We’ll have staring contests and porch picnics and bubble water toasts. But we’ll also do some things we haven’t done in ages. We’ll stay in an Airbnb. I’ll see my brother Matt for the first time in nearly two years. I’ll meet the baby he had last fall. We’ll make out first trip to Emmett’s parents’ house since having kids. Kip will meet his great-grandmother. I can’t wait.

We’ll be gone for a month. And when we return, it’ll be to a whole different rhythm. I’ll go back to work and Emmett will take on two kids full-time. Our slow, tender togetherness will be replaced by something else. Something, hopefully, that’s as beautiful as this stage of life has been.