I've never felt so much dread in my whole life. I feel sick to my stomach--completely panicked down to my very core. Every muscle in my body is rigid with apprehension and anxiety.
Tomorrow is the day.
The day I go back to work.
The day I abandon my child.
It's an event I've looked to with fear and dread for twelve weeks. Now, don't get me wrong. I like my job. It isn't the job I'm dreading going back to. It's the child I'm leaving behind. I've never been away from him for longer than a few hours. And I wish I didn't have to, to say the least.
Three months I've been racking my brain, trying to come up with a way out of going back. A way to avoid leaving my sweet, beautiful baby to be cared for by someone else. During my darker moments, I've imagined myself abandoning all reason and quitting my job so I wouldn't have to make the choice to leave him. But then I remember: quitting my job would mean losing our house. It would mean going broke in just a few months. Worst of all, it would mean we would lose our health insurance. And boy, are we using that more than ever. No, I couldn't do that to my baby either. I don't have a choice. I have to go back. Sometimes being a grown-up sucks.
Before Roman was born, I had no idea how excruciating it would be to go back to work and just leave him. I just thought, "This is what people do. They have their baby, they take a few months off, they go back to work. And that's that." But it is so much more than that. I am leaving a part of me behind.
To me, the idea of handing my child to someone else and leaving him for several hours at a time every day is the equivalent of willingly having my fingernails ripped from their nail beds one by one, day by day. It is the cruelest of all tortures. I don't think I can do this. I don't know how I am going to be able to go through with it. The panic is crippling. All I can think is, "There's got to be another way. Please let there be another way."
Until then, I'm wallowing with my "mini" chocolate peanut butter brownie shake from Iceberg. It dulls the pain a little.
*Note: I realize that some working mothers may take offense to the insinuation that working outside the home when you have children is the equivalent of abandonment. It isn't. (Unless you are going to work and leaving your child home alone, then yes, that is technically abandonment.) This is simply the description of how it feels for me personally to leave my own child as I return to work, not a judgement or criticism on other moms for working outside the home.
