Dear Pepper: More Puppies, More Problems

Dear Pepper is an advice-column comic by Liana Finck. If you have questions for Pepper about how to act in difficult situations, please direct them to Questions may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Dear Pepper,

I am thirty-one years old, happily married, with a career and two children. I am currently on maternity leave with a six-month-old and a two-year-old. I feel lost, and mourn the person I used to be. I want to embrace amor fati, but I really can no longer recollect who I once was.

I feel like my brain is stagnating. I either have no time to engage my mind with anything satisfying, or, when I do have a little time, like after the kids go to bed, I am too wiped to apply myself. I have a wonderful, supportive husband, who offers me moments to myself when he gets back from work. But the relentless chores and tasks, and the groggy way I feel about my appearance—it's impossible to even put on a decent-looking casual outfit—means that even these breaks don't offer me satisfaction.

My question is: Can a middle-class mother in our present-day, urban, Western society, living without extended family, having to work to sustain her family financially, confined to a relatively small apartment, hope to realize herself?

I mention the lack of extended family because I now understand how hard it is when no one is around to help with kids. And I mention the small apartment because, although I have a beautiful home, there is something about a small space full of mess and toys and laundry that feels stifling.

Does this sense of loss of self get better with time? How can I embrace my fate right now?

Yours truly, A Mother

Dear Mother,

I've been having trouble figuring out how to answer your question, because I feel like I wrote it.

Since my son (my puppy?) was born, I've felt like there have been waves—some of them many months long—of crisis, during which the best I could do was keep us both alive.

I did fine the first few months of his infancy, because I was expecting to be fully Mom during that period, but I wasn't expecting it to continue indefinitely. The waves of crises that ensued included illnesses, child-care lapses, and sleep regressions.

And those butted up embarrassingly against my work. I brought my then one-year-old son along on a four-month residency overseas, where I shirked many of my work responsibilities because I didn't have enough child care.

I don't particularly feel that my life/career have waited for me. It's not that I think they necessarily should have. But rather that, somehow, I shouldn't be put in this position—I don't think my husband has experienced parenthood the same way at all.

I've come to think that New York isn't well-suited to raising a family without an endless amount of money—maybe other cities are easier. You can laugh off a small space and other inconveniences when you live alone, but not with a child.

I wonder now if it's better to live in a small, tight-knit community when you have little kids. Ironic, since so many of us who live in the city came here to escape that.

None of this griping is because I don't love being a mom. A lot of my complaints could be solved by policymaking and cultural shifts (a.k.a. dads being encouraged to take parental leave and to take off from work early to pick up their kids from day care).

My advice is to get as much help as you can, from your husband or from anyone else who might pitch in with child care, cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, logistics, etc. And try to set up regular things in your life—work, social, or otherwise—that get you out of the house. (The next step is to be autonomous enough to read a chapter of a novel while still in the house, uninterrupted, but I don't think any new mom has cracked that nut.)

Six months = so young; two years = so hard. Things will get easier. But part of what will make them easier is strategizing. And they will never get easy enough that you will be able to stop strategizing.

In solidarity, and with love,