Enter The Nanny

Our new very part-time nanny started this week.

Let me say that again: the nanny started this week! An event filled with joy, relief, a little fear and a little guilt.

She comes from 8-11 on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Not a lot of time, I know. Barely enough time to get started on the million and one projects I'm either late finishing or late starting. But still. Already its making a huge difference. I'm astonished how much more I can get done in three hours compared to before MAS was born. I've become efficient, folks. Before? I was a typical creative: scattered; distractable; prone to sudden insights while doing the dishes. Now? I sit down and do it now because I know I've only got 2.25 hours left and I have X to complete and Y to outline. Yet another way in which I'm not the same Minerva Jane as I was before he so dramatically entered my life.

Yet another gift he's given me.

Back to the nanny.

It took me eight months after MAS's discharge from the NICU to hire someone, even though I was already technically back to work a month before he came home. (Ebronis and I have a marketing firm. We shifted most of our clients over to him during my brief bedrest but I retained one or two.)

My mother-in-law comes one afternoon a week, so this isn't as bad as it seems. Besides, he goes to bed at 7.

Still, things have piled up.

But every time the idea of hiring someone would come up I would hesitate. The money! The drudgery of finding the right person! He was so vulnerable, you see... And I only needed a few hours. Weren't most people looking for full-time work?

All good points.

But behind all of this protesting, all of these compeltely logical reasons, was a deeper psychological one.

I didn't see my baby until 24 hours after he was born. Didn't get to hold him until he was a week old. He spent the first 9 weeks of his life cared for by a team of nurses, a group of predominately Philippino professionals. (I don't know why, but most of the NICU nurses at St. Luke's Roosevelt on 57th were transplants from the Philippines.)

They were all kind, competent people who had MAS's best interest at heart and without whom he wouldn't have survived, but it still felt so unnatural to be told when and how I could feed, hold, and comfort my own child. I had to ask permission every time. Sometimes it was granted, but if it didn't coincide with the nursing rotation it wasn't. By the end a weird psychology had evolved: I started to feel that it I didn't behave he would never be discharged. I tried so hard to be a good enough patient for the both of us.


So when I got him home? It was like I was making up for lost time. I encircled him, protected him in ways I wasn't able to during that last trimester-cum-first two months. And I was reluctant to let anyone else in...


But now? MAS needs more interaction than what I can give. And I need to figure out who this new Minerva Jane is. And get back to the non-mommy parts of myself...

So today she came at 8, fed MAS his breakfast of organic DHA- and probiotic-enhanced brown rice cereal, and took him to the park where they played on the swings and slide. He returned rosy-cheeked and exhausted from the playing. And now? He's napping peacefully in his stroller while I get back to my old bloggy self.