I don’t know about the rest of you, but I work too hard. When I feel like I have no choice (with a newborn baby and contract deadline), I work too hard. Even now when no one is riding me hard to meet a deadline, I work too hard.
When my son lost his tooth, I told him “it won’t be long before you will be a man.” He got upset. This is what he said to me:
“I don’t want to grow up because I don’t want to work all the time like you do.”
Yowch.
The lyrics to “Cat’s in the Cradle” came to my mind immediately. In fact, I had been promising him a trip to “the coast” with me for about six months.
“When you comin’ home, Mom?”“I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then, son. You know we’ll have a good time then.”
I am not exactly an absentee mother. I spend hours with my son every day, but the issue here is that I don’t spend a whole lot of really fun hours with him. We clean, cook, or do other chores. We have a good time together, but it’s not at all like going to a children’s museum. Those fun hours would be good for him and for me.
Not all moms even have the opportunity to spend a lot of “fun” time with their children, but I do and pass it up regularly. For all the moms who don’t have the opportunity, I know: I suck.
Pushing myself to work is part of what led to what is a pretty horrible postpartum memoir. If I didn’t push so hard I expect my own mental breakdown would have been that much less memorable. It might have taken me months, not years, to recover from my depression in pregnancy and postpartum.
We all create structures in our lives that may foster or worsen our mental health. Last week when all of the raw milk drinkers descended on the state capitol, I headed south to the beach for some sun and a work-related conference. (Though anyone who knows me that I worked all of the angles before figuring out that I couldn’t do both.)
While there I established a structure to ensure that I would have more fun this year. Behold two passes for Six Flags Magic Mountain.
Comments (2)
Don't discount the value of doing things around the house with your child. Fun's important--definitely--but in the end it's the day-to-day interactions (listening, playing, reading) that are more meaningful than Six Flags.
Posted by Janet | January 24, 2008 8:40 PM
Posted on January 24, 2008 20:40
I hear you, Janet. My problem is that I don't do enough fun things around the house either. But I'm working on it. We've been working on food art lately as part of my solution. :)
Amanda
Posted by Amanda Rose | January 24, 2008 8:45 PM
Posted on January 24, 2008 20:45