Maternity leave is wonderful. You’re given time to spend with your precious new baby, encouraged to let the world outside wait while you fully embrace the change that is becoming a mother, and you lose yourself in a strange bubble that is fulfilling and lonely at the same time.
Then, you wake up one day and realise that amidst the haze of sleep deprivation, nappy changes, anxiety about whether your baby is getting enough milk, and the all consuming guilt that seems to accompany every desire to be an autonomous human being again, you have to go back to your life in the scary, outside world. Your paid maternity leave is coming to an end. You have to go through yet another adjustment, stretch your personal and material resources, and survive another upheaval to your already transient schedule. Somehow you have to manage yet another identity, another set of expectations, and fulfil yet another quota of obligations.
You have to go through yet another adjustment, stretch your personal and material resources, and survive another upheaval to your already transient schedule. Somehow you have to manage yet another identity, another set of expectations, and fulfil yet another quota of obligations.
I’m getting myself mentally prepared to go back to work. For me, it is the running of two businesses, both fulfilling, both married together in a loose but functional symbiotic relationship. My personal training business is the boat that keeps me safe, secure, and sane. My acting career is the rocky sea that makes the boat feel as though it has purpose, and keeps my soul alive and hopeful. A romantic, stormy, and beautiful picture in principle. In reality, a terrifying prospect, given that neither career is particularly conducive to conventional family life.
Having a baby during a pandemic has been challenging. Having a 3 year old with a broken arm at home with no childcare whatsoever for the first 4 weeks with a newborn was difficult. Recovering from a C – Section with those responsibilities was difficult. Managing the sleep deprivation, the general grossness of post partum body functions, & the relentlessness of breastfeeding felt impossible. It just became a question of survival, rather than conscious management. Yet, through all of it, despite promises I had made myself, I couldn’t stop concerning myself with what I would do with myself once my maternity leave was over. How would I make my careers work? All of the self doubt that has haunted me for pretty much my entire life has come back with a vengeance, and I am reprogramming and planning, all over again, desperately clambering to keep looking forward, rather than letting myself fall into a proverbial black hole.
I don’t have advice on how to handle it at this stage. I know I am going back to work. I know I have to somehow create a working ecosystem between family, work and everything in between, but where I will have to compromise, how to handle so many conflicting priorities, making sure that I live up to my own expectations in all areas of my life… I have no idea.. I’m unnerved. Untethered. Unsure.
It will all work itself out. I’m sure it will. With enough ‘conscious effort for unconscious results’, solutions will present themselves. I know they will. But, there is a journey to finding those solutions, and it begins here. It begins with the anxiety, the fear, those tentative first steps in the dark towards the shadowy light of the moon. I don’t believe that the path is clear. I believe that everything, at the beginning, is a tentative step towards what you think you might know. With that kind of humility, you’ll be open to ideas and solutions that you find along the way, armed with a quiet courage and belief that actually, you’re not supposed to know it all. You’re meant to keep listening, reacting, and trusting in the moment to moment signs that action, and it’s results, can give you.
I don’t believe that the path is clear. I believe that everything, at the beginning, is a tentative step towards what you think you might know.
The world is full of those claiming to give you surety, to be able to guide you towards absolute certainty. Personally, I find the uncertainty, the seemingly random ebbs and flows of our existence, more appealing. Beautiful. And hopeful.
you’re not supposed to know it all. You’re meant to keep listening, reacting, and trusting in the moment to moment signs that action, and it’s results, can give you.
Not having the path illuminated in front of you is scary. I am terrified, almost all the time. But I’m also hopeful. My head remains filled with fantasies of what might be possible. Of many different ways that things could pan out. Sometimes those paths are scary, nightmarish roads. But much of the time, those paths are representations of endless hope.
If you don’t have all of the answers right now, don’t worry. If you feel that you don’t know where you’re going, don’t worry. If your path seems dark, or only dimly lit, don’t worry. It means that the doors of possibility are open to you. Outcomes are limitless. You only have to take the smallest steps to find the precious hope that comes with finding the beauty in the uncertainty of the moment.
