The Clock: Logging the Misery of Pandemic Motherhood 18 Minutes at a Time

Every day when I begin working, I start a timer.

I do this as a way to anti-gaslight myself. Because I need to see that my life is really as interrupted and chaotic as it feels. That the “Mommy, I MISS yous!” and wails of a baby who wants to nurse for the hundredth time really are as frequent and intense as I think. That I’m not failing, not crazy, not managing my time poorly.

The longest stint of uninterrupted work time I have had this month is 18 minutes and 36 seconds.

Forget a room of one’s own. I want 20 minutes of free, uninterrupted time in my own brain.

I am one of the lucky ones, if we can really consider any American mother on this sinking ship lucky.

I have full-time childcare from a truly exceptional woman to whom I can afford to pay a living wage.

My spouse is committed to feminist values. He gets up with the baby as frequently as I do. He shoulders half of the emotional labor. He cooks dinner every night. He cleans. His work gets interrupted, too.

He cannot nurse our baby. And while I might get shamed for ducking out of a meeting early, we’ve come to expect that moms will be frazzled and half crazy. So it makes more sense for me to deal with more of the child-related interruptions.

Eighteen minutes.

Writing this sounds like my infant screaming because she just recovered from COVID, is sleep-deprived, has separation anxiety, and yet again missed a nap because I just don’t have the energy to nurse her while standing up and bouncing her for an hour like she wants.

It sounds like my preschooler banging on the door. “MOMMY! SERI IS CRYING! MAMAMAMAMAMAMAMA!”

There have been four interruptions since I started writing.

There was just a crash outside of the door.

I practice gentle parenting because I want to raise emotionally intelligent people who can follow rules and respect the rights of others. This requires an inordinate amount of self-control. It means that when my preschooler pounds on the door because she wants me, I cannot follow my instincts and scream at everyone in the house to JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING MINUTE FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST. We have to talk about feelings. And boundaries. And respect. I take a lot of deep breaths.

It requires so much self-control. So much emotional intelligence. I get it wrong so often.

The baby is screaming again. The preschooler is yelling at her to stop ruining her playtime.

How are mothers supposed to muster the emotional control necessary to remain calm in these circumstances, after two years of quarantine with children who have now never really known social interaction?

Which reserves am I supposed to draw upon?

Two minutes since the last interruption. I need to nurse the baby.

I moved the baby’s playpen into the office so I can continue writing without her screaming from separation anxiety. She’s playing with a fish that makes turkey-like gobbling sounds. I keep thinking I have undiagnosed adult ADHD, but it seems just as likely that working while listening to a fish gobble is destroying my executive functioning. Why the fuck is a fish gobbling anyway?

I took a break from work today to go to the grocery store. It’s something I hadn’t done in two years, but now that my entire family has had COVID and all who are eligible have been vaccinated, it seemed ok. My preschooler wanted to go with me. But people around here don’t wear masks and I cannot expose her. She sobbed when I left. I couldn’t relax while I was gone. I rushed home, forgetting to get half of the things I wanted.

The baby was sobbing when I came home.

Last night she woke up every 20 minutes. Finally, I gave up, picked her up, and laid down on the day bed in the coldest room of our house with her. Parenting experts tell me this makes me a bad mother, that I’m not supposed to cosleep. But how am I supposed to continue being alive if I cannot sleep? So I removed all the covers from the daybed, and slept topless, and put a ball under my hip to wake me up if I began to roll, so that there was no risk of anything smothering her. I woke up freezing, but at least I got to sleep.

When I got COVID, everyone told me work could wait, and to take it easy.

But work actually cannot wait. I am self-employed. No work means no money. A sufficiently long period without work means no more clients. My husband, a civil rights attorney, is getting ready for a federal trial. Not working is not an option for him either.

Plus how are either of us supposed to take it easy with a sleepless baby?

And during a pandemic, you can’t call up family to help and risk their exposure to a potentially lethal virus.

Quit worrying about the house. That’s what outsiders advise. It’s ok if things aren’t perfect. Rest when you can. Sleep when the baby sleeps.

Ok, but when someone calls CPS on me for co-sleeping, if they show up and the house is a wreck, then what?

Presumably someone is going to have to clean the house at some point.

The baby wants to nurse again. Breast is best. Just don’t make anyone uncomfortable by doing it in public.

American mothers are drowning. That’s what the experts tell us. We, the mothers, the ones actually experiencing it, just feel like we are continuously failing.

The experts tell us that, too. That we’re failing.

That we need to not cosleep.

That we need to use fewer screens.

That we need to be calmer and more relaxed and get more exercise and spend more time outside and parent gently but not too gently and and and and…

All any of us can hear are the ticking clocks. The things we’re not doing. The frozen time between now and whenever this pandemic ends. Will it ever end?

Will it be better when it does? Because we were drowning before, too. And now we’ve normalized being exhausted and overwhelmed all the time.

I can’t wait for the day that, instead of writing a thinkpiece and interviewing a bunch of mothers about the seemingly hopeless realities of motherhood in this epoch, an institution points the finger at the society that needs to change, the men who need to shoulder their fair share, the government that needs to fund childcare and mandate paid leave. I can’t wait till we treat this as an everyone problem instead of a mothers’ problem.