In a word: boredom.
That may sound like a joke, or at the very least offensive. It isn’t. Allow me to explain. For those of you who didn’t read my first post, I am down in West Palm Beach taking care of my 6-month-old son Henry while my wife Blair rehearses a play. This is my first time as a full-time dad, and has brought many illuminations.
The happiest of these illuminations is that taking care of my son for a whole day isn’t that different than taking care of him for a few hours. It’s just more. This seems obvious, but until you do it for a few full days you don’t actually know it.But there are difficulties in full-time caregiving.
Foremost among them – boredom!
Don’t get me wrong. Henry is really cool. We have a lot of fun. But he’s a lot of work. He's also is not the greatest conversationalist (though not for lack of trying). And while he takes his naps, I am a man in Florida who knows no one and has nothing to do.
This is very much a new problem for me. I’m a writer with a day job. A surfeit of time has never been a demon I've had to grapple with. And now with a wife and child – well, there’s less time than ever.Now, however, I do have time. Lots of it. But it’s broken up into little bite-size bits that repel any attempt at sustained attention (which preclude things like writing). So I find myself, to my considerable surprise, bored.
This got me to thinking of Betty Freidan. She wrote the book that was the shot-heard-‘round-the-world of modern American feminism, The Feminine Mystique. She wrote that book in response to reading responses to a reunion questionnaire filled out by her classmates at Smith 20 years after graduating. Many (most?) of the graduates found their lives as stay-at-home moms lacked structure and meaning. They were, in essence, bored.
And let me tell ya, after only 5 days of it, I understand!
It’s a tough dilemma. Someone’s got to stay home and take care of those kids. And most people can’t afford nannies, even presuming they’d want one. What to do? I guess you have to find your more mature, adult meaning in life - as opposed to the wonderful meaning that really is brought by raising a child - elsewhere.
I’ll tell you what I did—I went to Starbucks before Blair’s rehearsal this morning and wrote. And I ordered a lot of movies from Netflix, the type of films you always want to see (Bergman, Kurosawa, Renoir) but end up leaving the video store with something starring Molly Ringwald. Maybe that’ll perk me up.I hope so. Else I might have to join the Sisterhood, which is problematic in all kinds of ways.
