Not much - and that's okay

Yesterday a friend I hadn't spoken to in months asked me, "So, what have you been up to recently, other than caring for the kid 24/7?" Horrifyingly enough, I couldn't come up with a single thing that would be of interest to anyone other than me and the other occupants of my house. "Cleaning a 1/4" layer of plaster dust off of every surface on the first floor of my house" just doesn't make for an interesting conversation, and neither does "Shopping for capri pants that don't make me look like I'm still pregnant." I have gone nowhere, seen nothing, and done very little that is either interesting or notable. My most exciting recent experience was bra shopping, for God's sake.

On the surface I seem like the perfect candidate to be a stay-at-home mother: I enjoy cooking, I enjoy working on home improvement projects, I enjoy sewing, I hate getting up early. But the problem with being a SAHM is that you somehow have to fit all that other stuff in around the "M" part, which sucks up most of your time and energy and will to live. Somehow in the past three years I've gone from being a successful chemical sales representative to being a person who measures her days by how many loads of laundry have gotten done and whose puke (human or cat) she's had to clean off of which pieces of furniture, and it has not been an easy transition.

One thing that has helped me keep my sanity recently is that I've noticed that my body seems to be returning to its pre-pregnancy state. It now has the same general dimensions it had before Liza was a gleam in her daddy's eye, and as far as I can tell my hormones are swinging back that direction, too. It's a nice change from the temporary hyperthyroid condition I had when Liza was a few months old (although it was nice to be able to eat as many milkshakes as I wanted and still lose weight), even if it does mean my pre-pregnancy acne issues are resurfacing. It's exciting to start to feel like my body is "mine" again ... for the last 18 months it has belonged to Her Royal Highness, more or less, and I've just been the caretaker. It's nice to look in the mirror and see something other than a baby factory or a milk machine.

But that still doesn't make for terribly interesting conversation, no matter how many graphic details I throw in. It's times like this that I wonder why I'm doing this to myself ... and then I think about letting one of the local daycare centers raise Liza, and I realize that it's not about me, it's about her. If I want there to be any chance that she doesn't end up saying "Thenk YEEEEEEEEWWWW," I've got to be the one to teach her the proper pronunciation (and we've got to move while she's still impressionable). If I don't want her afternoon activity to be sitting outside watching traffic while strapped into a giant mega-stroller with 10 other kids, I'm going to have to be the one taking her to playdates and the library and the park. And not just today, or this week, or this year, but always.

So for the next decade or so, my answer to "So, what have you been up to recently, other than caring for the kid 24/7?" is going to be, "Not much - and that's okay."