Thursday, May 31, 2012

Mommy guilt

Someone else is raising my child. Some people might say thats an unfair statement and working parents are still the primary caregivers in their child's life but I figured it out yesterday, excluding night time (since the munchkin is sleeping so I'm really not doing much parenting during that time), I have Z for 34 hours a week. Kirby (my dayhome provider) has him for 45 hours a week. Thats depressing. She has Z for 11 hours longer a week than I do. And a lot of my time with him is occupied with other things. A good hour every day after work is spent around dinner. Then on the weekends, he's sleeping for clost to 3 hours a day. We have church and family functions which take away a lot of our time together.
She is the one who takes him outside to the park, who works on potty training, who hears all the new words coming out of his mouth. She is the one who kisses his owies and cuts up his grapes. She gets the sleepy hugs when he wakes up and the grumpy ones when he's going to bed. I want that. I miss those things. Everyday when I go to work and I look at my desktop background of Z smiling at me, I want to cry. I was SO ready to go back to work and I loved putting on nice clothes and having adult conversation and not wiping bums and struggling to feed a fussy toddler but I'm so done with it now. I want to go back to the bum wiping and food struggles. I want to be able to stay at home with Z and make pictures with him and go for walks and all that fun stuff. I think part of it is that it's summer and there is just so much fun stuff we can do together in the summer, we are so cooped up the winter that we both go a little stir crazy that it was kinda nice that Z could go to the dayhome and have other babies to play with but in the summer, I just want to be with him. I am going on maternity leave in just 3 months, thats not that long. But it's all summer. I'll be leaving end of August which means I might have a couple weeks of nice weather with Z at home but I will be 9 months pregnant and then I'll have a newborn and it won't just be me & Z anymore. And that makes me sad. I want to be home with him right now, when I still have energy and can still go outside and play with him. But it wouldn't make any sense for me to leave my job a couple months before I qualify for a full year of maternity leave. But I want to.
Sigh.
It's been a bad week. I think coming back from vacation and having Z with me that whole time (plus the week before the dayhome was closed due to pink eye so hubby & I took turns staying home with him) was just so nice and reminded me how much fun he is right now. And how much I'm missing. I'm sick of missing these things. I'm sick of not being there. I'm sick of picking Z up, making dinner, doing bathtime and then putting him to bed and feeling like I didn't really get to see my baby all day.
I know I should be blessed that I have a great job, I have a fantastic dayhome and I live in a country that gives me a year paid to stay home on maternity leave. But to be honest, today I'm not feeling very thankful. Just sad.

No comments:

Post a Comment