My cool boss is back from maternity leave starting this week. It was pretty rough for me with her gone, and I wasn’t enjoying work very much. She is very laid back and supportive and nice, and we all really missed her. Sign of a good boss: when you want her to be there every day and you email her occasionally just to see how she’s doing.
So she’s back for half days and she brings in her new daughter Rebekah, since we’re the kind of office that doesn’t mind having a crib over by the scanner and the diaper changing station on top of the filing cabinet. We’ve all been spending a lot of time asking to hold her and petting her and cleaning spit up off our clothes and making up names for her. My personal favorite is Sea Lion since she makes this weird barking hiccup sound when you take her off your shoulder for more than three minutes. “Oh, who’s a little sea lion? Who’s a little barking sea lion? Oh, look, spitting up again, a little spitting up sea lion. Nice sea lion. You want to go to your mom now?”
I don’t have a lot of experience with really young babies, so it’s been an interesting and illuminating couple of days. It turns out it’s really hard to type if you’re holding a baby on your lap, for instance. Also, she already tracks things with her eyes, even though I guess she can’t see very far. The other day she was in the Moses basket that serves her for a crib, and Cool Boss had set up a folding puffy book with some graphic designs on the pages for her to look at. She did, she totally looked at them, with a sort of thoughtful expression on her face, as if she was at a gallery opening. “Ah, yes, excellent use of color here,” she says, looking from page to page. “A tour de force of the most vivacious and compelling kind.” I have also learned it’s very difficult to ask someone about their primary pain levels in the past twenty-four hours when my buddy Sea Lion is wailing for her third feed in three hours…there’s something about that high pitched angry hungry baby cry that programs us to throw down our headsets and run over there and make sure she gets fed. You just can’t ignore it. I guess that’s the whole idea.
So I kind of like having her here…for one thing, I feel really proud that my cool boss feels comfortable enough to bring her in and nurse and get her work done without having to be separated from her three month old baby quite yet. I know she’ll eventually go into day care…probably once she doesn’t fit in the basket…and it kind of makes me sad to think about a baby being with strangers all day, even if they are wonderful and caring and professional strangers. One of my other bosses also had a baby, and since she sees patients in her office, she can’t very well have the baby in there when she’s trying to provide therapy. She’s going to have the baby in a day care right next to the hospital so she can go visit him during the day and feed him and everything, so I guess it could be worse. It could be better though, that’s for sure. One of my other bosses is Canadian and she tells me that moms get a full year paid maternity leave. A full year. Full year paid. How amazing and common-sense and humane is that? All my bosses with babies have had to use their sick and vacation leave to stay home for the three months after birth, and that’s all they get. I guess there’s Family Medical Leave, but that’s mostly if the kid gets sick. If men gave birth, would we have more baby-related social infrastructure? It’s weird, I don’t quite know how to break down all the gender and class and society stuff, when it comes to babies and childcare and all that. I know all those things are in there, of course, but I don’t exactly know how they work or interact with each other. If I was a mom or planning to be a mom would I have a better sense? If I were a sociology professor, perhaps?
That’s one thing about having my little barking buddy in here, I have to say. She’s cute and she’s fun and she can really work a marigold-yellow dress decorated with what look like goldfish crackers like no one else I know, but it’s not engendering any baby feelings in me. I know that I’m at the age where my so-called biological clock should be chiming madly, but I still can’t seem to get into it. This is a good thing, as I am not in a place in my life where I would want to be responsible for kids…and honestly, I don’t think I’m ever going to be in that place. I love my friends’ kids and everything, and I know I will enjoy being an auntie when they get a little older and can correctly spell and pronounce my name. It’s still all intellectual to me, still something that other people do, no matter hoe much I hold her or kiss her or make little funny noises in her ear. I am fine with this, even though Sundry’s entry on this topic did make me feel funny inside a little. I don’t have the urge and I don’t think I ever will…so I guess it will always be vicarious spit-up for me.
