{"id":657,"date":"2006-03-01T10:44:00","date_gmt":"2006-03-01T10:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html"},"modified":"2006-03-01T10:44:00","modified_gmt":"2006-03-01T10:44:00","slug":"baby-steps-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Mommy Steps, Baby Steps"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today, I take my first hesitant steps back out into the non-mommy world. They are really little steps, because it&#8217;s only a few hours a week, and it&#8217;s very short-term. But still.<\/p>\n<p>I. Am. Stressed.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to complete the lectures for an undergraduate course that I was supposed to begin teaching in January but didn&#8217;t because I was too overwhelmed and FLIPPED OUT in the first weeks of Baby&#8217;s life. I was very busy battling hard to ward off the dark, dark spectre of PPD in those days, fighting off the Intrusive Thoughts and the gale of tears that threatened to swamp me every day and just generally struggling to keep tired head above water. Got through it, and life with Baby is now a lot more like steering a rowboat up a pleasant if rocky river than it is like keeping afloat on a stormy sea and that&#8217;s GREAT but seriously? That&#8217;s just mommy progress and it isn&#8217;t gonna help me back at the university facing a swarm of sullen undergraduates with last year&#8217;s lecture notes clutched in my unmanicured hands. (1)<\/p>\n<p>To be honest, the whole lecturing thing &#8211; even though I haven&#8217;t had a lecture-appropriate thought in god-knows-how-long &#8211; doesn&#8217;t concern me all that much. I&#8217;m a good teacher, so far as I can tell from the grainy photocopies of student evaluations that I receive at the end of the school year (<em>thnx professor!!! u r really good! u rock!) <\/em>(2), and I&#8217;ve been studying this stuff for frickin&#8217; long enough so I should be able to draw upon the resources that I&#8217;ve been acquiring over these many, many years. And? I sorta don&#8217;t care all that much if the little darlings don&#8217;t receive the best of me because a) I&#8217;ve seen many, many lecturers in my day and many if not most of them suck. Badly. And at risk of sounding stuck-up (tho&#8217; I am that), I&#8217;m pretty sure that I&#8217;d have to work at it to suck as badly. And b) undergraduate students tend to be criminally ungrateful, so WTF should I shred my soul in an unsung effort to enlighten them? And, most pressingly, c) I&#8217;m too preoccupied with the fact that I&#8217;M ABANDONING THE BABY.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m leaving her in very good, experienced sister-in-law hands, and only for a few hours, and she&#8217;s going to love it because my god there will be cooing! Kisses! Non-stop holding! But still. <em>Leaving<\/em> <em>the baby<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Mommy&#8217;s heart flutters. She didn&#8217;t think it would, she thought that she&#8217;d love this moment, she thought that the heart would race from the exhilaration of freedom. But she doesn&#8217;t, and it doesn&#8217;t, and the heart, instead, it flutters, and there is much wringing of the hands and she hopes that Baby knows that no matter how much Mommy pursues\/clings to non-mommy things, her mommyness has become and will remain the most important thing she ever is or does.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: 0px auto 10px;text-align: center\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/photos1.blogger.com\/blogger\/7878\/2181\/320\/Emi%2015%20003.jpg\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><em>I&#8217;m supposed to just walk away from Those Eyes?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;<\/p>\n<p>1) University students in their late teens\/early twenties are, with some very important exceptions, a singularly grubby and ungrateful lot, and so it is that I can&#8217;t really view this as labour of love, as did <a href=\"http:\/\/jezewhiz.blogspot.com\/2006\/02\/even-more-disjointed-banality.html\">Jezer with her charming Grade-Fours.<\/a> It&#8217;s an effort by me to hang on to part of my non-mommy\/pre-mommy self, and to keep alive the hope that I will, one day, return to academic life, none-diminished by overwhelming obsessions with swaddling and <a href=\"http:\/\/badladies.blogspot.com\/2006\/02\/toyz-in-tha-hood-part-ii.html\">fantasy<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/badladies.blogspot.com\/2006\/02\/our-top-story-tonight.html\">nursery governments<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>2) I&#8217;m not a professor; I&#8217;m an &#8216;Instructor.&#8217; They don&#8217;t give you tenure-track jobs until you finish off those last chapters of that little thing called a dissertation.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><i>Originally published at <a href=\"www.herbadmother.com\">www.herbadmother.com<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today, I take my first hesitant steps back out into the non-mommy world. They are really little steps, because it&#8217;s only a few hours a week, and it&#8217;s very short-term. But still. I. Am. Stressed. I&#8217;m going to complete the lectures for an undergraduate course that I was supposed to begin teaching in January but&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-with-baby","category-post-partum-depression"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Mommy Steps, Baby Steps - Their Bad Mother<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mommy Steps, Baby Steps - Their Bad Mother\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today, I take my first hesitant steps back out into the non-mommy world. They are really little steps, because it&#8217;s only a few hours a week, and it&#8217;s very short-term. But still. I. Am. Stressed. 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I&#8217;m going to complete the lectures for an undergraduate course that I was supposed to begin teaching in January but&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html","og_site_name":"Their Bad Mother","article_published_time":"2006-03-01T10:44:00+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/photos1.blogger.com\/blogger\/7878\/2181\/320\/Emi%2015%20003.jpg"}],"author":"Catherine Connors","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html","name":"Mommy Steps, Baby Steps - Their Bad Mother","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"http:\/\/photos1.blogger.com\/blogger\/7878\/2181\/320\/Emi%2015%20003.jpg","datePublished":"2006-03-01T10:44:00+00:00","dateModified":"2006-03-01T10:44:00+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/#\/schema\/person\/e5cb41c7478a8741b1ca837d0ad3eace"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html#primaryimage","url":"http:\/\/photos1.blogger.com\/blogger\/7878\/2181\/320\/Emi%2015%20003.jpg","contentUrl":"http:\/\/photos1.blogger.com\/blogger\/7878\/2181\/320\/Emi%2015%20003.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2006\/03\/baby-steps-1.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Mommy Steps, Baby Steps"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/","name":"Their Bad Mother","description":"Amy Julia Becker on Faith, Family, and Disability","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/#\/schema\/person\/e5cb41c7478a8741b1ca837d0ad3eace","name":"Catherine Connors","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/48c\/48c0936a787715d590be21174b52d353x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/48c\/48c0936a787715d590be21174b52d353x96.jpg","caption":"Catherine Connors"},"description":"Catherine Connors is a mother, writer and recovering academic who traded the lecture hall for the playroom and discovered that university students and preschoolers have much the same attention span. She still dips her toes into academic waters by writing the occasional scholarly article about the place of motherhood in Western philosophy, but mostly now she changes diapers and wipes noses and indulges in long reflections on whether Yo Gabba Gabba is a harbinger of the decline of western civilization. Oh, and she blogs: in addition to Bad Mother blogging at BeliefNet, she is, among other things, the author of HerBadMother.com, the moderator of Her Bad Mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Basement, the co-founder and co-editor of WeCovet, a contributing writer\/editor at MamaPop and BlogHer, and most recently (deep breath) founder of and contributor to Canada Moms Blog. And in her spare time\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 oh, wait. She doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have spare time. 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