So much for the fantasy of co-parenting

Yeah, last night was pretty bad. It ended with me crying in bed while JD ignored me in the living room. I could of course just blame the hormones, but I don't really think that's the full story. The full story is that I need to come to terms with the fact that I am the person who is going to do 95% of the day-to-day parenting with the fusspot until the economy changes or we win the lottery.

I think that I realized this pre-baby. Nobody seriously accepts a job 4 hours away from their apartment and husband with a 5-week old baby in tow unless they are suspicious that said husband is not going to be the most helpful person. Let alone moves to Europe for 11 months with baby, sans husband. But somewhere in that time away I romanticized what life would be like back here in NYC.

To start with the obvious, this is not a character flaw with JD. His employment supports our family, pays for daycare, is getting him out of debt, and provided the necessary cushion to consider doing fertility treatments less than 2 years after our last go-round (without a penny of insurance coverage for treatments). And of course, it allows us to plan to grow our family again in the future (hopefully through both IF treatments and adoption at some point). And needless to say, every single medical professional I have spoken to says "NOW NOW NOW" on growing our family. Every single one of my problems will only get worse with age, and if we have been given the incredible gift of needing neither IVF nor donor eggs, than we should take advantage of it.

But in short, it sucks for me. He leaves the apartment at 8:45 and on a really good night is home by 10 pm. And it's not exactly as if he happily leaps to do the dishes or laundry when he gets home anymore. He works at least a couple of hours every weekend, and not on his own schedule. This past weekend he was given a new job on Saturday morning to finish by Saturday afternoon, and then told that he had a conference call at 6 pm on Sunday. Not flexible, couldn't be 7 pm. So there went our dinner plans because there was no way that we were going to take 2 toddlers to a restaurant at 7 pm for dinner. On said conference call, his employer suggested that they might send him to Asia 'for a few weeks.' Yesterday. Yup, on less than 24 hours notice they wanted to ship him out indefinitely. Luckily someone else got that assignment, but the prospect of a few weeks abroad is looming over us, and particularly over our long-awaited weekend away, visit to my family for new years, and the two conferences that I need to attend this fall (and no, his work won't reimburse for our plane tickets, hotel reservation, etc.). I have a sinking suspicion that we will be that awful NYC couple who drops their toddler at daycare at 7 am on Friday morning and picks her up Sunday night. Because I can't cancel my work commitments (people apply to these conferences up to a year in advance and getting the reputation as a no-show can be a career ender), the family is not close enough to show up on 24 hours notice, and we don't have the type of local friends who could take the fusspot for the weekend. And she is in a home daycare, which she loves, and where she is comfortable.

But it's not just the big travel and the weekends. It's the fact that I have 30-32 hours of daycare a week, and I am also solely responsible for cooking, cleaning, doctor's appointments (which are soon to be a good 6-10 hours of my daycare time weekly), etc. I have suggested several times that we splurge on a once-a-month cleaning service, but JD is adamantly opposed. And it is just one more monthly bill that we'd have to pay and that would keep us locked in this awful Catch-22 even longer. So the only possibly way I can be competitive given my short workdays is to work 3-4 hours every night. But when it takes up to an hour to get the fusspot to bed, and then I have to clean up and cook dinner for the next night (still losing weight ... trying not to panic about that but definitely prioritizing cooking GD-friendly dinners in advance because otherwise I just skip meals), vacuum, dust (NYC grime is endless), etc. I am not sitting down at my desk until 9:30 at the earliest, and I am exhausted.

So something has to give. And I don't want it to be my career. I am good at what I do, and it is a good career for us in the long-term. It will provide me with a small paycheck (definitely not good pay, but I know that), good benefits, a flexible schedule, the possibility for flexible work during the summer, etc. I need that flexibility if we are seriously considering a family with several children who will inevitably all need to be driven to dentists appointments, speech therapy, language and religious lessons, sports, friends, etc.

So the question is what to compromise: cooking is out given that I am currently underweight and panicked about the health repercussions to the bargain baby. Cleaning seems likely to go, even though I feel awful watching the fusspot play on the floor of our apartment when it hasn't been mopped in weeks (true current state of the situation. If you lived in NYC you would understand quite how gross it is). As does any type of social activity for the fusspot and I in the afternoon because they just take too much energy at the moment. We go to the park and to run errands most afternoons, but I also pick her up between noon and 2 pm on Fridays and we had been trying to do a big NYC-adventure on Friday afternoons pre-shabbos (also an attempt to get her to sleep during services, which thus far has been a total fail). But I just don't know what else to cut. We briefly attempted CIO last week in an attempt to get me another free hour in the evenings, but it turns out that JD simply can't cope. And thus far the fusspot has yet to fall asleep after crying, she just sits bolt upright in her bed waiting for us for hours and hours and hours. She is down to waking up 1-2 times a night, but the end result of that is that either JD or I land up sleeping on the floor or her room for some part of the night. Needless to say my hips are a bit sore, and I really wish the room had space for a twin size mattress (it doesn't).

Anyway, I'm sure no one has read quite this far and this really about my venting and strategizing. But it is clear that the current schedule and my workload and responsibilities are completely not viable and part of my frustration is that my darling husband doesn't get that, and keeps saying he wishes I were less stressed and demanding when he gets home at night. His solutions are to skip cleaning entirely (such a guy) and to stop keeping kosher so that we could order cooked meat to eat, but my food restrictions are a fundamental part of who I am and I am not willing to consider compromising them at the moment, especially as the fusspot is becoming aware of her food choices. That may change at some point in the future, and when it becomes a real health issue instead of just a lack of energy/sleep trade-off issues, we will consider it further. But for now there just doesn't seem to be much to cut. I have a beautiful, sweet toddler who needs my attention from 4 pm to 8 pm every day. I have a career which requires long hours, and a husband whose career requires longer hours. I am about to add multiple doctors appointments every week, and eventually, hopefully another person to the mix. No wonder I am stressed.