When you hear a pregnant woman explain the plans she has for when the baby is born you nod, making her see that you are listening, but inside you are thinking "Oh, friend ... you will tell me when you are a mother". And there are many women who have plans when they are pregnant and then, when they have their baby, not only are not fulfilled, but they just do the opposite.
Something like that is what happened to my wife, who was very clear that when her maternity leave was over she would return to work and when she saw a five-month-old baby, about to return to her usual position, she said "no I can. I can't leave him "and he decided Don't do it, don't leave him and don't work.
Those prepaid plans ...
"I will take advantage of the maternity leave to study, to advance in what I have pending and I never find time to do, I will work a little from home, if the boss sends me things to do, etc." All those ideas that go through the mind of so many things that you will do during maternity leave as if you were going to be on vacation or something. No, no, no ... maternity leave is to take care of the baby, and soon you will realize that it is not even enough, that many days it would be necessary that dad could also be on parental leave, because two hands do not reach.
"I will take care of my baby during the low, I will extend it with the holidays and then I will leave it with my mother to return to work". This is what many women think, and many fulfill it, not without feeling that it is too soon, that they need you, that something is not right. That internal struggle between what you feel you should not do and what it seems you should and can do, which is to work. Because hey, they all run out sooner or later, and they all go to work ... "it must be the hormones that make me feel that way."
When you follow the heart, and not so much to reason
But no, it's not hormones, it's your heart, It's the link that started with your baby the day you knew you were pregnant, that half-knot knot that was tight, very strong, when it came out of you and you could hug it. That day the world stopped, your world, and there was only you and your baby, and you felt that you would be together forever, and that you would take care of him no matter what happened, and that you would love him every day and every day more.
And so it is as the days go by, you wonder how you can love someone so small and at the same time how you can look at him and say "for God, you have exhausted me", that you cannot separate from him (or her, I have only children as I tend to talk about "the baby"), but there are times when a mini Me inside tells you "not to be a night, to sleep and rest ... or to be an afternoon, to take a shower and look at the mirror for a while trying to end up being visible." A mini Me that never leaves you, but that has the patience to wait.
Then comes the fateful moment, that of the "see you later", and the nerves appear, and that feeling that I have told you, that you know you have to go to work, you know what most people do, everyone expects that Do it, it's what you play, but you feel that something is wrong, or that something does not add up: the fight between heart and reason. The fight between what is established and what your body asks you ... or the fight between what you would like to do and what your checking account demands.
There are as many situations as families, so that struggle, many times, must be silenced instantly. As bad or worse as you feel, or that money comes into the house or you don't get ahead. It is what it is. If there is no alternative, there is nothing left to say to your heart, and that of your baby, that when you are together, when you return from work, you will try recover lost hours.
But sometimes it is possible to throw numbers, make accounts and break the established. With what is established by society, what they call equality, the liberation of women and the day in which women demonstrated that they can work the same or better than men (I don't criticize it, I only explain it as trying to take a picture of reality, as I see it). Break with that and say "no, I can't leave my son alone."
This is what happened in my house. There were days left before he began to work, he hadn't separated from him for a moment: wherever she went, when he left home, he went. I was only five months old. Actually it was going to be a few hours, she worked as a dining room monitor in a school and it is not long that you are missing at home, but felt that something was going to break, that this tie knotted with such force was going to be undone a bit, as all mothers feel, and we decided to assess the possibility of living without that salary. As I worked a few hours, it was not a really high salary, so our lives were already before the relatively unkempt baby. It was only necessary to tighten the belt a little more and, in any case, find myself some more work, some guard as a nurse, etc. And we did it.
And now everything remains the same
9 years have passed and everything remains the same. She created ties with two more children, knotted them strong, very strong at the birth of each of them, and inside she said (told them): "Calm down, these will not fall apart until you want to".
And this is mom's story, that of my house, the one that has been dedicated to taking care of our children for 9 years, that has been able to be with them all this time, that has had to endure awkward, and very uncomfortable moments, when other people (especially women) have dropped that "lives maintained by her husband" or "to see when you work, you have not done anything for a long time" (true, "doing nothing", they said), but that has become the engine of the home , in the epicenter, in the "matriarch", the only woman. She alone with 3 children and a husband. She in charge of everything (like most women, in fact). And I do not mean that she does it all, because even so I have always been clear that of the two, she is the one who works the hardest and the one that makes the most difficult jobThat's why when I get home she also gets to work.
Mom, who made her first trip alone with the children a few days ago Yes, we are that weird, I guess. But this is how we have been working for several years and I don't think it has been so bad.
Everyone who does what they need to do and what they feel is best to do, but I tell our experience in case someone someday decided to do something similar, or is considering it, and feels a weirdo ... there are too many times I've I heard women who one day chose to stop working say "nobody understands me", "criticize me", "they say I live like my grandmother", "they think I do it to send the message that I am a better mother or something" . But no, this is not going to be better, or worse, it is not going back to the past or wasting the struggle that so many women carried out to get into the labor market, this is about the freedom to choose, to decide what kind of life you want to lead, to listen to your heart, to your guts and, if you can, because the situation allows it, and you want, break the rules and do what you feel.
