She wakes up at 7:30am. My boyfriend is the household’s only early riser and takes morning shift – he feeds her, changes her, and keeps her entertained downstairs.
At 9am, I come to awareness with a horrified groan and he hands her over to me. I gulp down caffeine pills or energy soylent and gradually unmelt as she runs around pulling her books out of the shelves and bringing them to me (the interest in books started a month or so ago – a very marked change) or pointing at things and going AH? so I can name them or give them to her.
I get on my laptop to do some combination of AI coding, writing, and digital chores. I was a better housewife when she was in the 3-9 month old stage where she wanted me to walk her around all the time but would ride contentedly without interfering with chores.
At 11:45am my husband comes upstairs (if he’s working from home) and gives me a lunch break for an hour so I can make lunch.
Around 1:30pm, she goes down for a nap. I try to be good and do all the housework I’m behind on, but I often go into a fugue state and write blog posts or fiction or code.
At 3pm she wakes up. We enjoy and craze each other for the next three hours.
- She opens my drawers and takes out my chapsticks and hair ties. I decided (and revoked later) that I’d rather lose my chapstick and hair ties than the 10 additional minutes of free time I get every day by letting her play with them.
- She brings me a blanket. This probably means she wants me to throw a baby blanket over her repeatedly saying “three, two, one, cover up that baby!”, something I’ve been doing for half her life.
- She brings me a book. I read her the book.
- She points up at the table at the scissors. “As you know,” I tell her, “you cannot have them. However, you can have this.” I give her something else. There are 1000 artifacts in the house because we live in a high-artifact-count civilization and the adults in the house have not reached complete consensus on which of the 1000 things are for the baby. I feel like I’m pretty permissive.
- She pulls out the sieves and colanders from a kitchen cupboard. Her favorites. She’s pretty good about not pulling out the glass or cast iron. She never seemed that interested in them to begin with and my ominous hisses when she touched them seem to deter her. In general, if she only mildly wants something, my disapproval deters her. I’ve been very touched by this. I didn’t expect such a spirit of cooperation in her.
- Similarly, after she pulls three kleenexes out of a box, I clear my throat. “Ahem. Now you must put them back. Put them back? Love. Put them back.” More than half the time she complies and stuffs them in. I don’t mind blowing my nose into kleenex that my toddler has handled 10 times but my husband doesn’t like it. But I’m the one who has her for 8 hours a day, so…
- She runs up to me and tugs at my pants. She wants up. I kneel down and put an arm out and she rotates, pressing her back against my body. She figured this one out soon after she started walking. She pointedly backs up into me.
- She starts crawling onto the coffee table. Not the big lower one that I let her climb onto. The higher small one with my laptop and glasses of water. I pull her back. She howls dejectedly.
- She sees the cat. She used to chase it but she’s better now. She stares for a long time and lurches forward just a bit. Unimpressed by the enormous self control and patience I read into her behavior, the cat runs away. I wish I could convey to my daughter how to plan and enact a courtship of the cat. When I sit down next to the cat and scritch its head, my daughter seems awed. I have something she wants.
- She climbs up on my bed. From there she climbs up on the sill, which is almost level with the mattress, and bangs against the window. Smack smack SMACK SMACK smack smack.
- I bought her a book on the minerals and periodic table so that I would not go insane. She ignores it and brings me a terrible book I slightly tried to hide behind other books – The Little Yellow Bee, whose illustrations and prose are particularly egregious. I read it to her grimly. My grimness is not evident in my saccharine, sing-song, crisply enunciated reading voice, which seemed to be latent in my evolutionary programming. When I finish, I pick up the elements book. I’m relieved to learn a bit of trivia about francium and californium before she slams the book shut on my hand and points at the radiation symbol on the corner of the cover. “AH?” she beseeches. She really likes that symbol. I tell her what it is and add, “It means it’s not for babies.”
- After seeing her scribble enthusiastically on my iPad, I bought one of those magnetic drawing pads. I draw circles and rectangles and name the shapes for her.
- I’m staring at a bookshelf in despair. It’s basically empty. We have too much stuff. These problems don’t cancel out because I hate this bookshelf and want it gone, but junk removal is hard – we’re paralyzed between the cheap and effortful way and the fast but expensive way. Also, whenever we call junk removal we want to throw out as many big items as possible, and agreeing on the list and collecting it is beyond us as a group. So the bookshelf stays, a cheap plywood monument to my failures.
- Another spot of madness. I numbly walk around with her because she’s bored by everything and I’m too tired to take her to the park or visit a neighbor. Then she points at a toy and self-entertains for a while. I sit on my haunches in despair, staring at the floor, her in my peripheral vision. When I look up, she’s mirroring me, doing the Asian squat with her arms folded ineptly. All the unhappiness leaves me for a few seconds. We laugh at each other.
At 6pm my husband comes upstairs to take over. I say, I need her OUT. Take her to the park now that the UV index is lower. And then I cook dinner if I’m good.
We eat dinner and then I feel residual madness from the day, so I often leave the house. I cannot tolerate more of my daughter running up to me, grabbing my legs, and howling at me to show her more of life, please, there must be more, I’m BORED, I want movement, anything, INFORMATION, I’m STARVING, I’ll DIE in this world if you don’t show me everything. Feed me the cosmos.
At 10pm I come home so my boyfriend (who usually leaves the house with me) can go to sleep. I’m starting to feel truly awake and sapient for the first time in the day. Not a childcare exhaustion thing – I’m just at my best at night. I hit my stride around 1am, which is unfortunately when I need to start going to sleep. Sometimes I ignore it and write until 2:30am, accepting it’ll be a rough morning.
Bonus:
On the weekends we trade childcare so some subset of us can go to an event we’ve been invited to. Or I heroically declare we’re going to a park or a beach. I take Ritalin to organize this and endure it. She is closer to death outside of the house. It’s like taking a fragile electronic out of the casing specifically designed to protect it and dunking it into the sand or the water. Are toddlers meant to get sandy? Surely they should leave the house sometimes. And see nature. But isn’t this creature worse at being in the sand than an adult human or a horse? This is like one of the worst animals to put in the sand. What about her crevices? Do swim diapers even work? She’s eating the sand. I googled it and apparently this is okay. But isn’t there a reason adult humans and horses don’t eat sand? I stare at her for a second, madness crawling through my mind before I forcibly dispel it.