How to make everyday life work

This week has been one of the craziest, busiest weeks in my life recently, with me trying to keep up with all my 4 jobs and get a lot of work out the way before Zoe gets here in less than a week. It has also been crazy because I let it: when Zoe is not here, I tend to work long hours, sleep too little and try to be social. To top things off, lots of little stupid things happened such as me getting a 100$ fine in the subway, by the police for walking in through the exit door without asking the attendant first (yep, not because I didn't have a ticket, because I have a weekly pass. I just tried to save time/energy from the turn stile rejecting me, I had gone two subway stations too far and needed to go up and over, entering the subway again before 18 minutes had passed) and the Instacard shopper forgetting my bagels (how could he? It was the most important part of my shop!). Bigger things such as teaching, conference chairing and paper deadlines were just standard parts the week. But it got me thinking that I need to write an updated "how to make it as a single parent in New York" since the last post like this was written in Stockholm (alas, it was "how to make it as a single mom in Stockholm").

• New York does not have the exact same concept as arstiderna.com, instead I buy groceries on Instacart (which is expensive because you have to pay for shipping plus tips) or FreshDirect. Instcart has the huge advantage that I can spend 10 minutes when I get to work, collecting my standard groceries and have them delivered in evening when I get back. They are always on time and they are good at providing exchanges when the item you ordered is not available. Except when they forget my bagels. 
• When I really don't have time to cook I get food from Munchery. They have great kids meals too and instead of traditional restaurant delivery which is always half-cold on arrival, this you have to heat yourself, for 10 minutes in the oven. It is prepared with that in mind and tastes really good, always.
• I do not have a cleaner here in New York, I simply can't afford it. Instead Zoe helps cleaning on weekends and I just care less than I used to.
• I have a score of fun babysitters with more or less flexible hours. There is the pole dancer (who I also helped getting a job in a bar) and the Danish college student. There is the girl who always bring her ukulele and the strict librarian type girl with glasses. But more importantly, I  prioritize spending time with Zoe and sometimes bring her to my office where she usually enjoys a bit of iPad time and free snacks. 
• Laundry is much less of a problem than in Stockholm. I simply take it out and pay 14$ for 10lbs. We drop it off on the way to school and pick it up on the way back the next day.

As for the things I hadn't figured out two years ago, there are still some things I haven't and probably never will:

•  Zoe still watches television (on her iPad) every evening when we get home while I prepare dinner. We have a rule that there is no television/iPad time before after 6pm because I don't want her to spend the afternoon watching television. But sometimes, it spills into book reading time and she is not happy about putting down the iPad. This doesn't mean she watches television every day, sometimes she just plays with her toys and forgets about it. 
• I'm still not a morning person and neither is Zoe. But we have improved our mornings tremendously, particularly after she started having to be in school at an exact time. We pick out her clothes the evening before, she can now get ready almost by herself. We braid her hair the night before so she can brush it herself (if not, it tangles and I have to spend 10 minutes brushing a screaming, crying girl). This doesn't mean I got it all down and occasionally things just break down. We still laugh at the thought of the morning when I placed a jar of Nutella with a spoon in front of her. "Sorry sweety, I have nothing else, this is your breakfast".
• Missing Zoe. I always miss Zoe terribly when she is not with me. This is something I will never get over, I feel cut in half when I don't have her.
• Having someone to share your day with. Two years ago I lamented not having someone to talk to about little everyday things, sharing the ups and downs and in particular the little cute things Zoe says. Living in New York has altered my everyday mood completely and honestly, I have nothing much to really complain about. More importantly, Zoe has grown and is now capable of more detailed conversations. We play the "tell me a funny thing about your day" game at dinner every night and I get to tell her about my annoying boss, the funny lady on the subway and that I talked on skype to a friend. She tells me about lunch, how another boy got kicked out of the classroom and that her teacher gave her a star for her letters.

All in all, things look slightly different than two years ago, but mostly for the better.

 

 

Skating magic in New York

Worn out after an hour's skating

Monday afternoon, the happiest mom and daughter walked home through the West Village's small streets where trees have mangled the pavement and where the narrow houses' front stair cases seem to invite for a rest. Zoe proclaimed excitedly "Mommy, today I didn't just get two new friends, I got three new friends!". It had been her first day of kindergarten and everything had been going well. She was welcomed and quickly became popular. Two days later, as I dropped her off in the morning, a girl ran over to Zoe, looking at her with admiring eyes and grabbed her hand. Her mom, introduced herself: "Kathy talks about Zoe all the time", she said and I knew we have a good situation going. Zoe was the new cool kid.

After Zoe begging me for days, today we went ice skating. It turns out that it is not necessary to pay 70+$ for access and rental at the Rockefeller center, instead you pay 30$ for two pair of skates at the free rink at Bryant Park. And you go on a weekday afternoon when it is drizzling so the rink is not crowded. The best thing was that they had little 'helper penguins' that Zoe could hold on to while skating, which made her much more confident and just when we were about to leave, she said "let me try without the penguin" (she has only been on ice skates exactly twice before). She went off and was able to skate on her own. I was in awe. She was excited and proud. I promised her to buy a pair of used skates so we can come back at least once per week before Christmas.

Flybaby is here and it is magic.

Slow Subway Jazz

The slow saxophone jazz on the 2. Avenue uptown platform made me slow down my pace and reflect on how much I love the New York subway. Its busyness, its roughness and its friendliness without chit-chat. I have yet to get on a crowded train with Zoe without someone giving up their seat for her or moving over so I can sit next to her. The calming music also finally allowed me to laugh about my bad-mommy moment of the morning: Me reaching over Zoe to turn off my 5:30 alarm but forgetting that I had plugged in my phone last night and clumsily dropping it, straight in Zoe's face. She cried in her sleep while I whispered, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry". Her eyebrow was read from the blow and I hoped it wouldn't bruise. She slept for another hour and a half while I got up and showered. 

One morning where I did not get
up at 5:30

I squeezed into the overfilled subway car together with all the other blonde career women with their lattes in one hand and their Tory Burch bags in another, only distinguished from their upper west alter egos by their edgy hats and flats rather than heels. One of them let me reach my arm over to hold onto the rail and we exchanged one of those smiles acknowledging that we were all in the same boat, going to the same kind of office job, staying late to try to make it in our competitive world before it was too late. Except I couldn't stay late, I had a four year old to pick up and then feed and put to sleep. I would then be so tired that I would fall asleep next to her, tumble out to brush my teeth around 11pm and go back to bed, only to set my alarm for 5:30 so I could get an hour's work done in the morning instead. But at least I was still in the career game, only difference these days was that I made my coffee at home and drank it at 6 am before Zoe woke up. And right now, I wouldn't want it any other way.

A latte and a biscotti please

I ordered a latte while Zoe crawled up on the barstool so she could see better. "I'm hungry", she proclaimed and I asked the barista if they had something to eat. It was a minimalistic coffee bar that I had found via my new favorite app and no food was on the counter. "We have biscotti?", he said and I looked at Zoe who nodded. Latte and biscotti it was, and one minute later we were out the door with our breakfast heading down to the subway station where the E train could take us to work. At the station, Zoe asked to taste my latte and she proceeded to drink at least a third on the train. After three bites she put the biscotti in her pocket. I guess she is a true New York baby by now, simply having a latte for breakfast before going to work.

Because going to work she was. In-between dressing myself and Zoe, my phone had rung this morning, Maria from Zoe's preschool informing me that there was no school today. The water main had broke and there was no water in the whole 5 story building. And I should not bring Zoe over before hearing back from them, i.e. this could take days. I quickly sent two text messages to my babysitters well-knowing that they themselves had to go to work and resistance was futile. I had to bring Zoe into the office for my three meetings. We packed up a few toys and most importantly the iPad, some snacks and set off.

Being a single mom is hard. Being a single mom in a city where I have peripheral friends and no family is really hard. But I also know these kind of things will happen and that there is absolutely no reason to panic because there is nothing whatsoever I can do. I don't have friends I can call up and ask for a favor, I don't have extended family here who can help out in a pinch. Wherever I go, Zoe follows. And this is great, we both enjoy it. We chat on the way to the subway, we walked all the way home through Greenwich Village, talking, jumping, buying fruit and a princess Pez. In my office, Zoe made a book on printer paper with a black and a red ballpoint pen about a naughty mom who turn into a dragon and blow fire (I don't want to put too much into that!), an activity that took the better of an hour where I got to review a student paper.

In the end the babysitter stopped by after work and looked after Zoe for 2 hours while I went to a coffeeshop to review a few academic texts that are due Thursday. She had done the dishes and Zoe was in her pajamas when I came back up, so all in all a pretty good deal. And I'm sure Zoe can't wait until another plumber messes up the preschool building again so she can share my breakfast latte. 

Deadline season

It's deadline season in my little tight field, which means that the yearly deadline for submitting papers to the major conference is coming up very soon. Everyone I know are frantically working overtime to collect the last bits of data, running analyses on it and writing up contributing results. Contribution is of course key, if a paper does not contribute with something 'new', it will not be accepted to this top-notch conference with a 20% acceptance rate. I submit on average 2-3 papers here each year and publish almost half of those, actually putting me in a group with a better average than the conference itself, something I should be happy and proud of. And of course I am.

What I'm not proud of is the tendency I have to push paper writing (and sometimes analysis) to last minute, like many of my colleagues. Back pre-baby this just meant a week of 14 hour work days but with a child, this is more complicated; she needs to be fed, played with and put to bed. Yet, I still for some reason push work to last minute, imagining that I will be able to work after Zoe is in bed. Last year around this time I managed to finish a rough paper in a week exactly this way. I slept 5 hours per night and the morning after the deadline, I dropped Zoe of in daycare and went straight back home, sleeping until early afternoon. The paper got in. It had a contribution.

Tomorrow I get Zoe back after 5 days away; I woke up crying on Sunday because I missed her so much. I'll pick her up early and take her to a playground and we will get ice-cream. I'll let her help me make pizza (she loves her rolling pin) and we will watch Danish kids tv together before reading a few bedtime stories. I'll see what my paper looks like after she is asleep. Perhaps I won't have any energy to continue working on it but I don't care. I have her almost every day until the deadline and I'm very aware I might not come up with those key contributions my two papers still need. And so be it.

It was no news to me that women pay a huge career price for having children, but new studies surfaced online yesterday confirming this outside academia as well. They even controlled for hours worked and socioeconomic level. On the one hand this kind of knowledge gets me down, but on the other hand it gets me furious and makes me want to work harder to prove the stats wrong. But it's a catch 22. To get more done, more hours are needed. These hours are directly taken away from me spending time with Zoe because I already optimized most optimizable parts of my life. But I'm not willing to do that. It's not Zoe's fault that I have a major deadline. She misses her mom as much as I miss her and she hopes to spend time with me. And I can't help thinking that this is exactly how I'll end up being a perfect example of the statistics.

The baby penalty

As a female academic with a child, not to talk about my early and continuing perpetual desire to have a family, the discussion of academic career and children has always been relevant and worrying to me. Having read all the books (Mason, Hewlet, Hewlet and of course Sandberg) makes me acutely aware that anything I do in my professional life I have to do better, faster and more rigorously than others to get ahead. I have to keep focusing on research, papers, networking and politics without skipping a beat. I repeat to myself the age-old saying (that Charlotte Whitton has been credited with): "Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men. Luckily, this is not difficult." Because I have to keep my sense of humor to get through the day. I find all these statistics and anecdotes indicating that children hurt women's career where they are an asset to men's, hugely depressing, not only for myself but also for all the other women who are not getting the most out of their life because they have to change career track and ambition level. These women are not contributing enough to society with their intellect because that is the duality of the downside: women don't get to contribute intellectually because they can't keep high level jobs and they are not happy with their lives because they had to give up careers or turn down ambition level to make ends meet. The ones who, like me, attempt to 'have it all' (like this is an unfair demand!) end up torn in half from this attempt, either compromising a career or compromising togetherness with our children.

And it is really hard to sell yourself, being someone who have made choices favoring the family for most of my career. I sometimes envision myself adding the following to my CV, right after me leaving the US and the top institution where I was, and the resent years, in the employment section and publication section: "The change of affiliation was due to family reasons and my priorities to my family took center stage for a short while, as I tried to maintain my professional contacts and publication record. The gap in my publications is in no way a reflection of a sudden lack of ambition or lack of ability, but simply a reflection of serious personal family complications. Future level of work will again reflect my true ambition level and opportunities".

I'm not sure how this would be interpreted but my big fear is always that people see my publication record and think "Oh, she had such great potential. Then something happened and she is clearly not dedicated anymore". Yes, something happened. I had a baby, got divorced and had to start all over in a new country with few potential collaborators and a scarce research resources (in Sweden, for example,  you don't 'get' PhD students, which has been detrimental to my research and career development). All in 2 years. But I am just as dedicated as I have always been, I'm as ambitious, if not more, as I always was and I still want to 'make it' in the academic system. I want to do interesting and valuable research, I want to publish and I want that solid, (semi)permanent well-payed position, no matter what the name of it is. I want the opportunity to do good work. And that's bloody difficult when you have to pick up a girl at 4:30pm and somehow feed you and her dinner while answering all the emails you didn't get to during the day, grade papers at night while the dishes are growing moldy and feeling guilty that the girl was watching an hour of TV while you were trying to review a paper.

If I were to be part of the statistics I would stay in this position, publish three workshop papers a year and never make professor. Ironically I'm already ahead of the US statistics where women stay in temporary teaching positions, get tenure much later and do too much administrative work to publish. So apparently I do have some sort of potential. I just need to find out where I can build on that because it is certainly not here. 

Everyday life as a single mother

I often wonder how other single parents do it. I don't know many and the ones I know I'm not close enough to to actually ask that question. So I rely a lot on what I hear in the media, in magazines and actually what my own mom tells me about her experiences from my childhood. But most of these sources talk about emotional issues, larger problems and overly dramatic events such as custody battles and big life changes. Nobody talks about the day-to-day life of actually being able to get through the day, fed, cleaned and well-rested at night, both mother and child, while still working full time. The gist of the problem is of course that there is nobody you can send down after milk if you forget and find out at 8pm when Zoe is in her pajamas. There is nobody who magically does the dishes while you sleep. And Sweden has no pick-up service laundries, instead you have to take it downstairs at a scheduled time. I certainly haven't cracked the nut yet but here is a list of the things I do have down, which make everyday life easier and doable for me:

1. I get food boxes from arstiderna.com ("the seasons", an all organic food delivery). These are boxes with all the ingredients for dinners, either for 3 or 4 days. A box arrives Monday and Zoe and I have food for the rest of the week. It is delivered at my doorstep.
2. I have a cleaner. Completely crazy because of the size of my apartment but I still have a bathroom and a kitchen and I still cannot imagine when I would be able to vacuum apart from the evening when oh, Zoe is sleeping (right…)
3. I have two babysitters who are very flexible and who I can ask to pick Zoe up and feed her dinner, so I can work extra long on deadlines.
4. I do laundry at night: I take the load down when Zoe is awake, she goes with me. Then I leave her sleeping to go down and put it in the dryer and a second time to pick it up. I have told her that I do that so she knows I will be right back if she wakes up. She has never woken up yet. I remember my mom doing the same with me. 

But there are also a lot of things that I haven't figured out yet and that I don't now how to deal with:

1. Zoe watches quite a lot of TV when she comes home from daycare. I have to cook quickly and often quickly means in 30 seconds, so Zoe watches TV while eating snacks, crackers and cut veggies. She uses my iPad to access netflix with all their kids TV. I'm pretty okay with most of what she watches but I would like her to spend less time on it. I often join her after dinner and we chat about the shows, while having a cup of tea.
2. I'm not a morning person and neither is Zoe. She is (like most 3 year olds) very slow in the morning and needs constant coaching to get ready. It takes me almost 3 hours from getting out of my bed until I'm at work. And Zoe cries for 3-10 minutes when I leave her at daycare. Still.
3. Picking up packages, taking back library books, buying specialty items are all a nightmare. I don't have any flexibility on a weekday to go the long way home from daycare to pick up a package or pass by a hardware store to get a small light bulb for my exhaust fan. These are small things but annoying when I haven't been able to see what I'm cooking for over a month.
4. Missing Zoe. I miss Zoe terribly when she is not with me. Although the initial freedom is nice, I feel cut in half when I don't have her. I'm sure her dad find it equally hard.
5. Having someone to share your day with. One thing I miss the most about being by myself is that I have nobody to share the day with. When something annoying happens, I'm stuck with it inside my head and when good things happen I get to share it on Facebook and get five likes. When Zoe says the cutest thing I cannot tell anyone (but this is also a problem with us having our 'own' language), instead I try to write some of it down.

Many of these issues are not often discussed, perhaps due to triviality and lack of interest, perhaps some are unique to me. But I'm constantly working on improving my everyday life, both for practical reasons and for improving my happiness.

November blues

It has been a few emotional weeks for me with issues I cannot tell many people about. Luckily I have a few very good friends here in Stockholm (yes, it happened, I still cannot believe it but it happened) who are of tremendous support to me and who do not flinch when I have a day where I cannot speak without tears in my eyes or have to walk out in the middle of a meeting. My lowest low was the hour I spent crying in a bathroom after walking out of a teaching course I have to take, because I realized just how much I did not want to be there, but wanted to be somewhere else. In my panic I managed to do even more damage, which I spent the next week trying to counter-control. I think I'm back on track and I learned a few things: 1) Have a glass of wine in the morning before a difficult (mentally draining) day. I promised myself that this is a once per year thing because I don't want to end up an alcoholic, but still it worked that day when I desperately needed it. 2) Don't send off emails or text messages when you are really upset, call your mom instead. 3) People who you think are on your side can flip in a blink of an eye and people who seem to find you despicable, have their own issues that are even worse than yours, and their seeming judgement simply reflects their own grief. 4) I'm capable of pulling myself together and run a two day conference for 25 people with a smile on my face despite my aforementioned breakdown.

How much turkey can a 3 year old eat?

Finally, I learned not to feel guilty as a mom. I'm doing my best with Zoe and that is pretty okay. Our life is not streamlined, or in any way normal; yesterday she went to dance class in a shirt full of rice from the previous day's sushi dinner and with leftover candy for breakfast, this morning we spent the time wrapping a present for her dad, whose birthday it is in a couple of days when she is with him, instead of eating breakfast. But she is also the three year old that I can bring to a Thanksgiving dinner who will play and entertain the other guests for four hours while I enjoy the company of other adults. And she is the three year old who plays "let's go flying" when other kids play they are going on a road trip. She is also the three year old I can take into a toy store and walk around with for half an hour until she proclaims, "oh, no more toys, let's go" without asking for a single thing. She really wanted to buy her dad a laptop sleeve with sushi on it for his birthday, but I had to tell her it didn't fit her daddy's laptop. She then carefully selected something else. She painted a cup cake on a card for him and tried to write her name but only O's came out. She might not be in bed at 8pm every night after home-cooked dinner at 6pm but I think that is simply not for us. And as long at I'm okay about that, she will be okay.

Hopefully the final weeks of the year will be better. I'm looking forward to a week's holiday with Zoe in Copenhagen and then a fresh start.

Two parents

Most children have two parents, a mom and a dad or two of each. A lot of kids also have bonus parents who have parenting roles and parenting responsibilities but who are not the children's "real" parents, instead this is someone who has entered the child's life a little later as the one of the parent's new partner. I was a lucky winner in that department, growing up with not only two parents but also two bonus parents, except I had a hard time thinking of my "bonus mom" in any terms of mother figure; she was only 13 years older than me. My bonus dad on the other hand made my nuclear family complete with two parents and three kids, me and my two brothers, who I always laugh with when we have to talk about us being "half siblings", because we are as whole as whole brothers and sisters can be. In fact I think I have a better relationship with each of them than they have with one another. So despite me being from a so-called broken family since my parents divorced when I was one, I grew up in the most amazing, tight-knit family, as occasionally dysfunctional as any other. And as most children, from tight-knit to dysfunctional families wish, I always dreamt of a family of my own. I loved children and could not imagine a life without, preferably more than one. It took me all of my twenties to find a decent guy who didn't bail out on me and my demanding career goals (and, I sometimes thought, high intelligence; I scared a fair share of guys away just mentioning I wanted to be or was a PhD student. Ironically my girlfriend's husband got a first date with her telling her he was a meter maid instead of telling the truth, that he was a CEO of a large international company. Silly me never thought about dumbing down).

But as I approach the latter part of my 30s I find myself as one of those two parents Zoe has, not living as a nuclear family, but as two separate individuals. Zoe might tell people she lives with me in Stockholm but she also lives with her dad half the time. That leaves many days and especially evenings for me to just be by myself, a nice thing for most part since I get to work long hours and read books. Oh and I am crocheting again, trying to finally finish that throw I started five years ago. But as any parent, I miss her terribly when we are not together. The feeling is numbed by me listening to loud music, reading non-melancholic articles and take yoga classes. I think about how difficult it is not to have her around, hear her talking, asking, playing and hugging me, telling me I'm the "best mom" there is. I miss her temper tantrums and her drawing on my students' assignments.

My favorite movie of all times: My father had it on
video and I must have watched it over 50 times.

But I take a lot of comfort from my own childhood; after all I turned out a whole person, despite my parents (the 'real' ones) never speaking a word to one other, as far as I remember. And here is what I realize: parents are different. They give you different things. They each teach you different things, if they mean to or not. They talk to you differently and they give you different answers. And that's a good thing. They might give you different limits and they might provide you with different tools for handling life. I fondly remember my father telling me all about the sky, the stars, the moon and explaining planetary science, seeding my eternal interest for science fiction and anything space. My mom could probably not name more than two planets. My father listened when I asked math questions before I started school and explained the basics, recognizing my keen interest in numbers. My mom taught me to write letters neatly and I took on her very special cursive lowercase r, written in a way nobody else do; it is our bond, expressed each time I write an r. And my mom explained patiently the notion of "gay" when I was almost too young to understand, just in so much and so little detail that it made sense to a 7 year old. I'm still so impressed with this and now I know exactly how to talk to Zoe about this topic. They each gave me very different skills, knowledge and personality.

So this comforts me in my missing Zoe when we are not together. She will learn things from her dad that I could never give her and she will know diversity to an extent one parent can't provide. He is around people I would never be and Zoe has more play 'uncles' than any kid I know, each of them unique in their approach and play with her. So this is the approach I'm taking, because after all, the most important thing I got from my father was his undeniable optimism, and optimism so prevalent that my mom and I both started laughing loudly when a psychologist who were evaluating him during a particularly rough time of his illness asked if he had a tendency to be depressed. An optimism he had until his last days where he couldn't see anymore, couldn't walk but still listened to the radio and told funny stories about him and me. An optimism he still had when holding tiny three month old Zoe for the first and last time during what would turn out to be my last visit to his island.

But I also hope that I can be just a little bit better than my own parents and make sure that Zoe gets to do things with both of us together, even if that is just playground visits and occasional dinners. I'm that optimistic.

A room of one's own

One of the 'features' of my new apartment is that Zoe has her own room. The apartment is tiny and I sleep in the living room but Zoe has a small room of her own, a concept that she already loves. There is an open space between her room and the kitchen, done obviously to get light into the small internal kitchen and where I was a bit worried about this at first (how do I make coffee at night without waking her up?), it has shown to be one of the best features in the apartment. She enjoys playing in her own room knowing that I can peek down at her and knowing that I am right there. When I fetch a glass of water for her at night she does not run after me because she can see me open the fridge and I can say hi while pouring it. Okay, I don't make coffee (I have a noisy espresso maker) at night anymore, but I do wash dishes and boil water for tea. She sleeps fairly heavily and so far I haven't accidentally woken her up.


I prioritized decorating her room over my own (well, getting a sofa bed was a fairly big priority, for almost three weeks I slept on a borrowed mattress on the floor) and I think it is almost there. When my mom was here a couple of weeks ago she bought a roll of wrapping paper with the Mumins on and stuck directly on the wall. Eventually I want actual picture frames for the posters I bought in Ann Arbor last week when I was there for a research meeting. And the rug desperately needs a non-slip plastic sheet underneath so we don't slide in it all the time. But these things are details. For now Zoe has a wonderful room of her own.

Two return tickets to India

I just bought two plane tickets to Mumbai, India. One for me and one for Zoe. It was not a difficult decision although some people in my life (read: my mom) think I travel too much. After all, what else is a "single mom" to do when she has freedom to do whatever she wants to do and happen to have a brother in India? That's right: my brother moved there in May with his other half who is now doing fundraising and yoga while my brother manages a department in a large producer of factory parts. I have never been to India but always wanted to visit, I have had many nice Indian acquaintances and find the culture fascinating. So why not find the first available week and go visit? In the end of November, I will grab Zoe, get on a plane and spend a week there including weekends on both sides.

Now I knew that India requires a visa, or that is two, one in Zoe's passport and one in my passport. Zoe has two passports so I chose to use the Danish one where the visa is the cheapest. For some reason Americans pay a premium for most visas in this world, something I learned when we took Zoe to China and her visa was three times the amount of her parents' visa. I also know that a visa requires you to hand in your passport for a short time. What I hadn't calculated was the very short time between my US trips this fall and the fact that I would need my passport for these. And what I hadn't done was to prepare my India visa application for handing in the minute I stepped off the plane in Stockholm two days ago. Today I realized that I have to wait with the Indian visa until I get back from my next trip to the US in the end of October, which leaves me with 15 business days to get it done. The website says 10 days so that should be okay. Still, I cannot help worry a bit and thinking that I am the one who needed two passports, not Zoe.

Staycation

This past week has been sort of an involuntary staycation for Zoe and I. As I have mentioned before, I have moved to a separate apartment and Mark and I are not living together at the moment. This also means that we are not having any holiday together but instead have done separate things, with and without Zoe. I have therefore been on my own with Zoe in Stockholm for most of this week without daycare since Zoe's is not starting her new place before Monday. Mark is traveling with some friends. It has been a lot of fun but also stressful. Stressful because I have a lot of work in terms of papers that are due very soon, both accepted, semi-accepted and brand new papers, but with an energized toddler, work is out of the question; when she finally sleeps at night, I'm so exhausted that I can barely clean the kitchen. But also stressful because when Mark out-of-town, I am very alone here in Stockholm where I have barely made casual friends yet. I admit that much of this is my own fault, I try to socialize but honestly, my Swedish is not fit for girlfriend talk and the English speaking people I have met so far have mainly been stay-at-home wives who have followed their (sometimes Swedish) husband here and I don't feel I have a lot in common with them. I do have a few Swedish colleagues that I speak English with and whom I would consider friends. But they are on holiday this week. So Zoe and I developed a routine for doing toddler-focused activities morning and afternoon, and for me to have coffee and relax during her mid-day nap so I didn't go mad from spending 24/7 with my lovely but quite demanding daughter.

Zoe stamping my ticket at the tram museum

Wednesday for example we went to the Tram Museum where they have a little train the kids (with adults) can ride and I knew she loved it, so I showed up early enough to get early tickets (half an hour into opening hours the next available train times are usually 3 hours in the future. Good luck entertaining kids for that long in a museum). And today we went to the Postal Museum that had a special kids-section open in where she could paint her own postcard, send it off to grandmother (they actually gave us stamps!) and play in a special kids sized postal car. She was a darling all day despite having slept two hours less than normal, perhaps because I spoiled her with two ice creams and a lollypop.

But today was the last day. Tomorrow her dad is back and will take her in the afternoon where I hopefully will be able to finish one of my papers. And then vacation is over.

Mom on a Mission

The month of April for some reason has ended up being crazily filled with travel and deadlines, for both me and Mark. I had a funding proposal due yesterday which I hadn't really been able to start on until two weeks ago. Mark is away this week (don't ask where, I think Ireland and Brussels, not necessarily in that order), which means that I have exactly 7 1/2 hours to work every day due to both drop off and pick up of Zoe. As I have described before, our mornings can be rather long and chaotic and it is not easy to get myself ready when she is roaming around. With such limitation to my working hours (normally around a deadline I work more like 12 hours per day) I had to be extremely efficient, not just having lunch at my desk but explicitly turning off my email, phone and Facebook while working during the day, just hoping something important didn't happen (it didn't). But I surprised myself; with the determination that is normally reserved for the subway commute, I managed to work effectively and although I still needed to actually write several appendix documents yesterday morning, I had a funding proposal at 4pm. I submitted it and Zoe was not even the last kid to be picked up.

Tomorrow we are going down to Copenhagen for a bit of R&R, seeing mainly my parents and brothers. This is the last trip before I am leaving Zoe for a full week with my mom (and two days with my best friend who stepped in the days my mom couldn't). We are flying Norwegian, the discount airline that won't let Zoe sit next to me on the empty seat. The big question this time is if I should finally let her walk to the train station instead of bringing the Beco carrier? She is big enough to walk that far but I also like to have a way of securing her. In the airport there is also a quite long walk but they have luggage carts I can put her on for that trip. In will report back how it goes.

It was never meant to be like this

When I have a rough day, a straining hour or even just a bad moment with Zoe, like loosing my temper on a subway platform, I often think that it was never meant to be like this. Parenthood was never meant to be a single or even duo person chore. The good old saying "it takes a village" echos in my ears as I wonder where my support network is. Because having my lifestyle and career means that there might be many supporters but none next door. I have several close friends that I could call up at any hour of the day (and I do occasionally); I have wonderful family who even visits often, but all these people all are between 1 and 10 hours flight away and have been since Zoe was born. When I hit my head badly on the kitchen sink last night and the thought flashed through my mind that I might need stitches (not that it was that bad of a bruise but one's mind does tend to wander towards the extreme) the only one I could think of to call to look after sleeping Zoe was a younger male friend of ours who lives 10 minutes away. Not a close friend, not someone who have ever looked after Zoe or any other kids for that matter, but someone who Mark goes drinking with and who works in the same research center as we do. We have colleagues, but none whose phone number I have, or who lives within any proper distance. There is no village.

Modern parenthood is very independent and lonely in its structure and we tend to pay people to do the chores that was done by extended family and neighbors in "the good old days". This has become even more apparent now that we don't have an arsenal of payed people in our household anymore (well at least a nanny, a cleaning lady and an occasional babysitter seemed like an arsenal when we now only have one busy occasional evening sitter). Scandinavian daycare and wage levels plus our general financial situation means this is no longer an option.  When Zoe was sick two weeks ago and Mark's board meeting overlapped with my teaching I called an emergency nanny service. I left a sick toddler with a stranger and paid her a considerable amount of money to go to work. She was my village.

I keep reminding myself that this is how things are; I have made a choice to live like this, I have decided that I can do that. Even when I scream at Zoe because I just can't take her crying for the 5th day in a row while I am in the shower and there is nobody to distract her and she got tired of Pingu, I try tell myself that it is okay because it was never meant to be like this. I am in an extreme situation. And perhaps one day soon there will be a bit more of a village.