Today I was thinking about how much maternity leave I have left, and realized that SHIT, only like, six more months! When I think about Ash being almost one year old, it seems like billions of years away, yet when I think about how much time I have left living off the government, it feels like tomorrow.
I’m not going back to work. I have my job, if I want it, back in London, Ontario, but we’ve decided to stay put in Halifax for a couple more years. It was actually Clive’s suggestion, much to my surprise. There’s not much fishing here, and I thought that it’d be a deal breaker, but it appears not. Hopefully this summer he can get out and do some deep sea fishing. Maybe for sharks or something equally big. He loves fish that fight. The small bass in our stocked lakes are a far cry from the pike that Northern Ontario offer.
I can’t imagine being away from Ash to go back to a dead-end job that I only liked because it “allowed” me to surf the internet for hours at a time and was a reallllly great pregnancy job because I sat on my butt all day and got paid a decent amount for it. It’s not that I want to avoid daycare because I don’t want “someone else raising my kid,” but rather, I’d just miss him and think about him all day long and wouldn’t be able to get any work done. Frankly, I don’t miss having coworkers at all because I haven’t had a really good one in a while.
And jesus, what if I missed something big, like his first step? I’d never be able to live with myself. And if I let other people take care of him throughout the day I wouldn’t be able to protect him like I do now. Hopefully when he gets bigger (which is happening too quickly, I might add), I’ll be able to put him in some kind of play group to increase his social skills. Sometimes I wonder what kind of kid he’ll be, because sometimes when my sister or other people (or even his reflection in the mirror) will make him literally shy away and hide his face in my shoulder. It’s adorable, this coyness, on a 4.5 month old, but I wonder if he’ll be a shy kid. I always feel sorry for them.
I don’t know how long I’ll be able to be a SAHM. I long to be a WAHM, maybe bringing in a sitter (like a high school student) for a couple of hours in the afternoon so I can lock myself in our (non-existent) office and get some work done. I’m not sure how much money- if any- sewing these slings will bring in. I’ve got some web development jobs that come to me, which is great, but I’ve never had to go out and find those jobs, they’ve always come to me, so I can’t rely on them to pay any bills. Today I got an offer to do some more writing, and I’ve said that I’ll do it, but I’m worried that at day’s end when it’s time to hunker down and write creatively and like, spell words properly, I’ll be so tired of chasing around a baby all day nothing will come to me.
