motherhood is hard.

Bebe has a cold and he is feeling miserable. That means he’s ultra clingy and not enjoying himself even when he’s outdoors, which he usually enjoys. It’s been awful sleeping next to a sick baby because he would wake up and wail loudly and thrash his arms about (one of his fists usually land on my head or my eye), crawl up and fling himself down on my face. I tried suctioning his snot out with the suction bulb, which of course he absolutely hates.

Today while I was eating a snack in the kitchen, hubby was playing peekaboo with bebe: hubby would look about and say, “where are you bebe? where are you? hello? hello?” while bebe hides behind hubby with both of his hands on hubby’s back. After a while bebe would walk around and show his face, then hubby would said “there you are!” and bebe thinks this is the best game ever.

Then hubby told me that some weeks ago, he was driving to the gym. On his way there, he saw a nanny holding a baby. He thought about a nanny holding our bebe, and hubby said he actually felt sick. Hubby said that it didn’t seem right that someone else other than us should be holding bebe, especially outside the house. I was surprised to hear it, I thought that he had been open to daycare and nannies, but I was very relieved and happy that he had strong feelings about someone else taking care of bebe. As long as our finances are taken care of (i.e. the mortgage payments), hubby’s left it up to me to decide how I want to proceed with childcare arrangements when my mom leaves. Still, I needed to know that he feels as strongly as I feel about this being the right decision for us.

I don’t know how this will all play out… this being my business plans and career development for the next few years. I do worry about how people would think about me, if they would shake their heads and say that I was wasting my talent. I worry about how I would manage myself – my emotions and my intellectual energy that had gotten used to being expressed in various intense ways, usually through fast paced entrepreneurial activities. I worry about my earnings, whether I could create a way to generate revenue such that we could actually be “financially free”.

This worry is further amplified by the reality that this year, for the first time since I started working and since I started my own business – that we’re getting a tax REFUND instead of paying additional taxes over my estimated tax payments. For the first time in 10 years we went down the tax bracket. Even though this had been part of my plan (I see a diminishing return where after earning a particular amount, it was worth less for us to be in a certain tax bracket – to work harder but keep less). I did want us to come down the tax bracket and keep more of what I earned even as this means I’d be earning less. I wanted to impose this new “selection pressure” the way that a microbiologist creates a hostile environment in a petri dish: it forces the life in that petri dish to adapt and in fact, use the hostile environment as a new food source and thrive. Did I mention that my undergraduate degree was in microbiology?

The fears are there. The anxiety is there. What people would think. Whether we could pull this off. How I would manage.

But the way I see it, the way I feel about my decision to stay home and be bebe’s mom and make things work around bebe is much stronger than the fear and anxiety I feel.

Who knows… I may just figure out a way to make this work, and I can then teach others how to do what I did.