Next week I’m going back to work full time and joining the land of the grown-ups once again.  Gone will be the days of gluing googly eyes to everything (one would assume…), and I’m feeling so many different emotions about it.  Of course I feel beyond lucky that I was able be home with SB (Small Boy) for a year; but I also feel grief stricken that it’s going to end in five days.  I keep telling myself that he needs to start pre-school and it would just be creepy if he stayed home with me until he was 18, but I’m going to miss him terribly.  Most of the time.

By the way I’m carrying on you’d think he was going off to boarding school for the next 12 months.  Today at his “Fish School” class at the local aquarium I was thinking, “this is the last time we’ll see the baby sharks and rays”, like we’d never go anywhere again. It feels like we’re breaking up and I should write some bad melodramatic poetry about crying black tears or something.

It’s been a year of wildly funny moments, shockingly embarrassing ones, times when I really, really understood why wine is referred to as “mommy juice”, and the always prevalent fantasy of running away to a tropical island where no one would yell, “mama, I have to go pee-pee, please hold my weenie!”

Before I had SB I used to wonder why people insisted that motherhood is the hardest full time job of all.  My former job was non-stop stress – always on call, insane deadlines, maniacal holiday seasons, and I’d think, “What the hell could be so hard? You’re home all day, doing fun things, and then they nap”. My God, I can be an idiot…

The thing is, you’re ALWAYS on.  You don’t get a lunch break, and when they’re napping you’re too wiped out to do anything you want to get done.  I had a list of things to do while I “wasn’t working” that sounded something like this:  lose 20 pounds by working out while SB was napping, refinish the wood on the stairs, plant a vegetable garden and repaint the living room.  What got done?  One wall was painted and I gained ten pounds.

So back to work – I’ll finally get to relax now.  Maybe someone will let me cut their lunch up and glue googly eyes to something to ease the pain of our break-up?