Читать книгу Unravelled: Life as a Mother - Maria Housden - Страница 13

I bent down, placed my hands on either side of Will’s face and kissed both of his cheeks. ‘Remember, Muffin, Mommy always comes back,’ I said.

‘Yes, momma, I know,’ he replied, throwing his arms around me for a final, quick hug before running to join the other two year-olds in his day-care class.

For the past year and a half, since Will was three months old, I had been working part-time as a financial analyst for a large telecommunications company. There had never been any question between Claude and me that I would return to my job after taking a maternity leave. After all, we both knew that I was a different kind of mother – more capable and independent than our mothers had been when we were growing up. Besides the fact that we could certainly use the additional income, it was important to me that Will, and any other children we might have, understood that while I was a wife and mother, I was also a woman, who had individual interests and a successful career too.

But lately, the last thing I wanted to do each morning was to pull on another pair of pantyhose, leave Will in the arms of someone else and pretend to care about a corporate job. Becoming a mother had rearranged my priorities in a way I had not expected. I couldn’t tell if it was because I was unusually efficient or shamefully unmotivated that I now seemed to spend most of my time shuffling papers around on my desk, leaving file drawers haphazardly open, and making sure there was a complicated-looking spreadsheet on the screen of my computer in case a manager popped into my office unannounced. Stretching 10 hours of work into a 20-hour week seemed more exhausting than the actual work was.

Now, as I weaved in and out of the traffic, I no longer felt as certain about what I wanted as I had just a few months before. Rather than tailored suits and business meetings, a part of me longed for play dates with other moms and kids, turtleneck sweaters and jeans. It wasn’t that I no longer wanted to be an independent, interesting woman or that I didn’t value the idea of a career; it was simply that I couldn’t help wondering if it might be possible to find a sense of meaning and usefulness in my life that wasn’t connected to the amount of money I made or the work I did.