But what I really was was a teacher with no paid leave and a husband who had made much better decisions than I did in our formative years.
Part of me was embarrassed to tell people. I quit my job way past what was courteous, and it hurt my feelings when people told me that they thought what I was doing was great, but it just wasn't them.
"It's not me, either!" I usually said.
Because I like working.
One of my first jobs was washing dishes in a teahouse when I was twelve years old. The owner and I were in charge of the back of the house staff consisting of only me. The other owner worked the front of the house wearing late 19th Century dress and would wait on customers only after she descended the staircase and preformed a short monologue as the woman who owned the home when it was built. Her lines and staging never changed.
The best days were when we had a tour bus of Mormons come through. Because we were running the ship with a skeleton crew, I got to help serve our guests in a cotton shift dress. More than once, I was asked if I was a nice LDS girl, and I would say, "Yes, I probably am," in the hopes of getting a tip because I didn't know what LDS meant.
And only once did I get a co-worker at the sink. He was one of those larger than lifes, the greatest person I'd ever met in my tiny, rural Missouri town, so I'm sure I literally skipped home to tell my parents. He'd been a former student of theirs.
"Oh, him!" They said. "He stalked another boy in high school then tried to shoot him in the parking lot of his university. I guess he's out of prison now."
None of my other jobs were quite as good as that first one, but I've had a very robust and fulfilling work life.
It was scary to stop something I'd done continuously since before it was legal for me to do so. I was fully reliant on Jaime. The baby fully reliant on me. And she refused to give me any money for doing by far the most difficult work I've ever done.
If you haven't been a stay at home parent, the closest thing to it might be the personal assistant to an influencer with billionaire parents. But you probably haven't been that either.
I didn't wear a complete outfit for almost an entire year. During Sol's sleep regressions, neither of us slept for more than two hours at a time. My brain atrophied, and I was constantly worried about saving money. Jaime and I didn't feel married anymore, or maybe we were feeling for the first time what it was really like to be married.
Sol never, ever wanted to stop gnawing on my nipples. The house was never clean. I felt like I was losing my mind and screwing up my baby. Everything was my fault.
And unlike sacred Canadians, I had to find a job during this time. The night before I gave an interview lesson in front of high school students, Sol and I were up several times just to make sure my nipples hadn't run off and left her.
I bombed the lesson. They still hired me. The state of American education is absolutely dire.
But it wasn't until our unlimited time together had that end date that Sol and I started to relax. We ruled the park and the grocery store. She started crawling, and we began to communicate with each other in a way that finally made some fucking sense to both of us.
Sol started daycare when she was eleven months old. We both cried every day for the first two weeks. I felt like I was missing part of my body, so I can't imagine how she felt. And even now, when I pick her up after pushing my Nissan Sentra to its absolute limits, I snatch her to me and smell her head. She smells like daycare.
It's the saddest smell I've ever smelt, and I feel like the solid layer of guilt wrapped around my shoulders will never leave me.
But I still like working.
Teaching sucks, but it's important and easier work, in my opinion, than staying home. I also want Sol's world to be really big, much bigger than our house. Her daycare is diverse and full of people who love her because of her personality and not because they have no choice like Jaime and me.
There are a lot of things I wish I could change for my daughter, but staying home for our first year together will never be one.
Photo: This is how I want to imagine Sol feels at daycare if everyone
else were named Sol, too, and were clip art.
