How Baby

Lifted from an actual honest-to-goodness conversation I have had with a friend who’s also a mom: you can’t make this up. Like ships passing in the night, sailing away to some distant playdate.

I was grousing about this later, and how it kind of feeds into this subconscious belief that parenting is boring drudgery, and that women especially become boring drudges after they have kids. That all creative drive, curiosity, and wittiness melt away under the pressure of, you know, being a mom.

And like… man, they’re not wrong, it’s an uphill battle to stay engaged in things-that-are-not-family-life, because family life is so absorbing. I didn’t realize until I sat down and wrote it out that I have an incredibly strict weekly routine, organized around who needs to be where and when. And everyone else has their own routine, so even when you use your tiny sliver of free time to try to reach out for something even a little bit outside that, you bump up against other people’s little bubbles of routine.

This is why it’s so hard for me to answer when people ask what I’ve been up to, because the answer is ‘coaxing the wheel of my week to turn smoothly, and trying to catch some rest when I can’, which is… not terribly interesting! It’s very isolating! I’ve been trying to make a conscious effort to expose myself to new media and information as part of my new year’s resolution this year, because I’m tired of not being able to think of anything interesting I’ve done.

(Shoutout to Angela for letting me use our conversation as comic fodder. <3)