I look down into the bathtub and oh, okay—that is shit.
Brown bits of sediment spread around my 9-month-old who sits contentedly in the water. I lift him up and a full poop is crowning. I let it drop into the tub.
I grab the baby’s hooded lion towel and place him on it. Then I get to work fishing poop from the tub, flushing it, scooping out the bath toys, throwing them in the sink to sanitize later. I drain the tub. I run the shower, pushing tiny bits of remaining fecal debris down the drain. The naked baby kicks and claps while I spray the bath with sanitizer. I let the cleaner sit long enough to do its job, wipe it away with a fistful of paper towels, then blast the tub one last time with hot water from the shower. I grab a fresh washcloth, plug the drain, set my son back in the tub, and start over.
Bath time, take two.
I carefully rub flakes of salmon out of his eyelids and rice from his neck rolls. I plop him onto a clean towel, dry his face, his torso, his legs. Swipe some Aquaphor between his butt cheeks and get him into a clean diaper.
We didn’t lose five minutes to the poop fiasco—a predicament notorious for clearing out entire public pools. A situation that would send bedtime careening off the tracks for an unseasoned babysitter. A debacle that would paralyze someone inexperienced in the optimal order of operations for disentangling poop + water + bath linens + children.
My reflexes are quick. My panic does not set in at minor provocations. I am steady in an emergency. This is the work that motivates me and that matters to me—yes, bathtub shit mitigation, among other subspecialties. It’s the type of work that takes up most of my personal RAM. But it’s not the work that I talk about.
***
After the bathtub incident, my husband and I melted our brains with an episode of “House Hunters International.” A family from St. Louis was relocating to Brisbane for the husband’s job. The wife referred to herself as CEO of the household. My husband snarled every time she said it: “That’s not a job.” And no, it’s not work in the way some people hold work sacrosanct. Her role is not credentialed by an institution with a .edu address.
But I also grimaced at her “CEO of the household” schtick. It gave girlboss while teetering a little too close to tradwife.
I am what you would call a working mom. I send the kids to daycare four days a week so I can bust out my client work. Then from Friday through Sunday, I’m in full throttle parent mode. But I find myself bored when people ask me—out of politeness or because it’s a normal topic of conversation—about my work. I know what they mean: The articles I write, the copy I edit, the assignments I hand in for cash.
I don’t have much to say about the work I do between Monday and Thursday. I enjoy it, and I’m good at compartmentalizing it from the rest of my life. My workdays are punctuated by pumping sessions to express milk for the baby. Work is a thing I fit in around the needs of my kids—the literal mouths to feed. Money-making work is important, but it’s not the main thing.
For my husband and me, stay-at-home parenting is harder and more demanding than going to work and getting an assist from daycare. (Yes, both situations are hard. Being a parent is hard. Also yes, we’re stupidly lucky that we can afford to have two kids in daycare right now.) Keeping both our jobs is preferable to us, if not categorically easier.
So why can’t my husband or I just let that lady from Missouri call herself the CEO of the household? How would we prefer for her to identify? What are mothers allowed to be if not C-suite boss babes in their own homes? And if I don’t want to talk about my work, my capital-J Job, but I’m also not a stay-at-home mom, what does that make me?
***
My stay-at-home mom friends understand me more than a lot of people. But I don’t deserve to commiserate—I have four glorious days of childcare each week. Four days where I fuck around on my laptop and edit articles about life insurance and small business loans. Four days where, between pumping sessions, I could technically fit in a workout or paint my nails or eat my lunch in blissful solitude. My stay-at-home mom friends don’t have that.
But it’s the work at the center of the stay-at-home-parent’s universe that I find most urgent, always scrolling across the inane ticker of my brain: Did you bribe your kid with M&Ms during potty training? When did your period come back after you weaned? Do I need to bring a gift to a 3-year-old’s birthday party after the parents have insisted “no gifts”?
These days, I do not want to spend my precious, finite time at a coffee meetup with another freelance writer to discuss new business strategy. But a meetup with a fellow mom to compare notes on the toddler sub-Reddit where we both lurk? Be there in 10!
I am good at my paid work. As a technical writer, I am quick and clear and precise. As an editor, I machete through bullshit and make order out of chaos. But my motherwork can’t be turned off or set aside with an OOO. When my kid starts projectile vomiting banana bits in his crib on Saturday night, I can’t hit snooze on it until Monday. The stakes are higher here. It’s way more personal.
***
The work of parenting has forced me into some attempt at body awareness. I’m practicing pausing to breathe, identifying whatever ugly feeling is festering in my gut, saying hi to it, leaving room for space to grow around it. After that, I usually go back to my kids a little less rough around the edges. I sometimes manage to deescalate toddler-on-baby violence in a Dr. Becky-approved fashion.
This cycle of tension and observation has led to constant introspection that’s easy to avoid in my day job. Minor slips as a copyeditor don’t feel like a mirror reflecting all my shortcomings as a human being the way it does when I lose my cool on my 2-year-old.
This is the work that occupies my potholed postpartum brain. And It’s not the stuff of casual conversation, even with other parents.
In a recent episode of “Death, Sex, and Money” about finding yourself in motherhood, host Anna Sale—god bless her, voice like a benzo—calls out a word that I use all the time since having kids: season.
As in: This is just my season of life right now, where things are hard and I am harried. The postpartum season. The season of raising young kids.
“We talk about [caregiving] as a season that’s time off, where we’re not focusing on the things that get measured and valued because we’re doing this other side work. … It’s not just motherhood, and it’s not just parenthood. It’s like, it’s the central project of life to learn and to study our experiences of giving and receiving care.”
This is literally all I think about. It’s all I want to talk about: The central project of life. Giving and receiving care.
I’m looking for the right outlet for this conversation—is it my fellow parent friends? Sometimes, not always. Friends caring for aging or ill parents? Perhaps. A bunch of strangers on Reddit? Quite possibly. A woman who self-identifies as “CEO of the household”? I mean, that will never not make me cringe. But it could be anyone.
After all, this season we’re in—of giving and receiving care—is interminable. I know my kids won’t be little forever. I am deep in caregiving mode right now; sometimes lost in it. But soon they’ll both be toddlers, then little kids, then big kids, then teenagers, then adults who still need their parents. Adults who will likely find themselves one day doing the deep work of caregiving alongside the work of their day jobs, cleaning their mother’s shit out of the tub after clocking out for the day.