quitting time

(on deciding to leave my full-time writing job to be a full-time mom, instead)

The interstate stretched before me, stretched and warped, and for every mile my white sedan covered, another mile was added to the road ahead, and the road ahead came to a point so far away the blacktop threatened never to end. We applaud mothers who return to the gym, to their closetfuls of clothes, to their dayjobs and the person they were before. Rarely do we wonder if their social media victories are reality, if the toned tummy is rumbling, if that smiling face framed in curls is actually happy at the office.

My smiling face was happy to be there but I wasn’t all there: half of me was still at home; I left my heart in my son’s small, dimpled hands. Well into afternoon, I choked down my muddy java concotion, a combination of French vanilla blend and salt from the tears I cried into my morning coffee as I left my happy, cooing child to pursue a career that, until his birth, was everything I ever wanted. For so long, motherhood seemed to me a thing one does, like I’m a writer but I’m also other things, like an identity slipped into and out of as easily as putting on and taking off a dress. Motherhood was an abstraction. A nice idea. I could be a parent, hypothetically speaking; and then I became a mother and “mom” replaced “staff writer” as the essence of my being. Being V——’s mom is the only thing that matters is something I never thought I’d say until I said It doesn’t matter if I ever publish anything again; as long as I’m a good mom, everything else is extra.

Nine months in a state of suspension, living between lives, slowly molting, shedding old me in preparation for bringing new life into the world, vaguely aware that moment would forever alter the fabric of my universe. Nine months passes like bicycling through wet cement and then all at once you’re out of the thick of it, and where has the time gone because The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For has arrived, and wasn’t it just yesterday I received confirmation that this moment loomed on the horizon? Mixing metaphors used to drive me nuts but now I understand everything’s connected if we look closely enough; I learned that the moment my son was born. The moment my son was born, I became a mother and the moment I became a mother, I wanted nothing more than to simply be that.

Six weeks of living in a haze, bones aching with tired, head spinning and heart threatening to burst like a balloon overfilled with happiness. It would be another couple weeks before I learned the heaviness of an empty chest. At work, I longed for the weight my son’s head resting where my collarbone meets my shoulder, our hearts beating in unison; I counted the seconds until quitting time, until the clock mercifully nodded, go home to him. I forced myself to exit casually instead of dashing out the door, to say goodbye to my coworkers, to walk, not run, across the parking lot. We applaud women who return to their careers but I can’t be the only one who spent every car ride ugly-crying, trying and failing to hide my shoulder-shaking, soul-scearing sobs from strangers at red lights. I splintered myself in two and spent every day applying pressure to the wound so I wouldn’t bleed through my facade and finally, head spinning, visions of my baby’s toothless smiles swimming in my head, I drove down that surreally twisted interstate to the only place that treats this type of injury.

I drove home.

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Katherine Mansfield is a full-time mom and when-she-can-sneak-a-few-minutes-for-writing writer who runs on coffee, the sheer joy of motherhood, and the loveliness of early-summer sunshine. If you like what you read, consider tipping the writer or subscribing to first drafts.

photo by Nicole Bell