Rest and Striving
Gestating a baby takes most of my energy but not much of my time.
“It’s not unreasonable,” Robert asserts, almost admonishing, “for you to only have the mental energy to do work a couple of hours a day.” He gestures vaguely at my belly. “You’re doing a lot.”
He keeps telling me to rest, and he’s not the only one. But I feel like I barely do anything else. I’m living a life of privilege and ease, and I’m very conscious of it.
I’m working on a novel (the first fifty pages are submitted, fingers crossed), but I haven’t had a job that felt like a “real” job in more than a year: my art internship last summer was a paid pleasure I felt like I stumbled into. The Masters degree was plenty of work, but it’s different when you pay to do it.
And now I’m pregnant, and I’m uncomfortable calling that my main thing. Even though, as Robert (again) points out, it’s not a bad choice for life-changing priority. But even if I accepted it as priority, what would I actually do with my time?
It’s funny to write this, when a year ago I had so much to say on the desire and challenge of slowing down.
I left my faster-paced life with great intentionality. In the spring of 2023, I finished my full-time fellowship, took the summer off from my weekends-and-evenings graduate degree, backed off a lot from my volunteer leadership roles, stopped trying (temporarily, I assumed) to conceive with frozen sperm. I was doing too much of everything, and I could feel it. No baby? No wonder, with all the stress.
Over the course of the summer, I determined to live more immersively: one thing well, and then the next.
These choices worked out in ways I could never have predicted. Most phases of life are strange, temporary, and ultimately humbling, but usually more so in retrospect.
Because I had only my remote course work, I was free to follow Robert to London. And now I am married, pregnant, and living far from where I expected to be. My relationship with Robert is the shortest I’ve ever been in, and will be for the next five years — by which time we’ll likely have a house and multiple kids.
Rapidity and intentionality are not antagonists. We’re both frighteningly decisive, and had spent years prior deciding what would be important in life. It is a rare gift indeed to find two visions that fit together so neatly; much more so with someone you can see yourself still enjoying in a future decades away.
But in the now, the transition is a bit existential. I wrote in Half about the strangeness of accepting shared income as a person who has always been fiercely independent. It’s circumstantial; little chance I’ll stay fully unemployed in the long term. I have a great deal of respect for parents who make their families their full-time, but I suspect my ego demands at least a nod toward lucrative vocation.
For now, though — my body is doing better, but my energy is back on the wane. We hiked four hours this weekend and then napped the rest of the day. There was a time in second trimester when I considered getting a London job, but I’ll just leave it in a couple of months anyway — probably not worth the tax headache.
I’m reading Travels with Epicurus, an old man’s philosophy-informed meditations on age, purpose, and idleness: the importance of play. Appreciation of simple flavors. The pleasures inherent in a rhythm appropriate to the moment.
It’s apropos; I’m dogsitting a geriatric King Charles Cavalier. We’re well suited: she takes me for walks morning, evening, and night, showing me Hampstead’s flagstone walking ways. She moves slowly, but I have nowhere to be. We both need to lie down a lot during the day. I paint her portrait in watercolor while she naps.
She snuffles; I turn a page; baby presses a small, hard foot against the inside of my skin.
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