Allow me to explain....

My legs felt wobbly and weak.

Hudson's knees were clinging to my hip and his pudgy hands were pawing (painfully, I might add) at my hair. For a moment I thought I might drop him. The path from the parking lot to the Star's newsroom has never seemed so long or so nerve-chafing.  

Before I gave birth I would bound up the stairs at the foot of One Yonge St. like a happy puppy and speedwalk into the newsroom wagging my tail, always eager to get to my desk. I would bark at the editors, lick my colleagues, etc... 

But this time, I wanted to barf and sprint home. 

Anxiety bubbled up my esophagus and threatened to explode all over the newspaper's foyer. 

In my seven months of mat-leave I have avoided my workplace. 

A generalized, but paralyzing fear washes over me whenever I think about my professional life. It stops me from acting on any reporting impulses I might have, such as taking notes, emailing sources and especially writing this blog (sorry!).

So when there are long lags between posts it's because I'm actively battling a demon that's recently popped into my life. A feral creature, it has two heads - predictably they are the working girl and the mom. 

The two are always fighting (maybe because they're both Jewish?). 

Despite my copious fears about still being competent at what I do - I've been itching, scratching and clawing at the walls in desperation to get back to the daily fun and frustrations of my job.  

The working girl hates doing housework. She's tired of wrestling Hudson to sleep twice a day. She's depressed about being out of the loop, beneath the competition and frankly, she needs more structure in her life to be productive at all. That's part of the reason why I still haven't sent out all my well overdue thank you cards... 

This worker chic also knows that in 15 years when Hudson is a teenager, she'll be lost without a life of her own - one devoted to pursuits in addition to raising children. 

But the mom in me kinda likes the relaxed pace of life and the stress free evenings of staying home. Even though she's going a little stir crazy lately she might be able to talk herself into believing she doesn't need to go back to work to be an independent woman....  

This all plays out in the course of our regular routine, when tears fall suddenly while I'm packing away tiny clothes Hudson can no longer fit into or when he refuses the boob in favour of tasty solid foods. 

Or when I realize Fiddler on the Roof is true! Sunrise Sunset, my friends!!

There's a war inside my head and someone's gonna get hurt. 

It was almost my editor. 

Hudson spit up on the floor of his office when I finally pulled myself together and marched inside. A little mess never phased me before, but this was the barf that almost undid me.

"Sorry!" I yelped, dropping the diaper bag over the spit while I fumbled for a cloth.

"Oy! I'm just not cut out to be a ..." I muttered under my breath.

"What?! Dont you dare!" the editor said to me.

"a STAY-AT-HOME mom," I said, completing my sentence once I had wiped the small, white regurgitate off the carpet. "A stay-at-home mom. I'm really looking forward to getting back to work!"

Messy is the new Sexy!

By the time we left, there was poo ground into the carpet. 

Tasty cereals, hard and crusty from air drying in an unwashed baby bowl, were threatening to clog the marble sink and there were fresh dribbles of pee, squirted during the most recent diaper change, on the hotel room's otherwise pristine white pillows. 

"It looks like a rock band stayed here and trashed the place," Ted said, of the Ritz Carlton room, where we stayed a few weeks ago while attending a family function in Detroit, Michigan. 

Feeling guilty for the state of this formerly lovely, sweet smelling suite, we grabbed our suitcases and shut the door quickly, locking the key inside. We left quietly like bandits on the run, afraid of being caught and dragged back inside to clean up.

***

The house is a pigsty. Curious George is lying at the bottom of the stairs like a drunk who only made it halfway home after binge drinking the night before. A musical toy curiously keeps turning itself on in the living room. My kitchen seems to manufacture tiny, dirty socks and Huds' high chair is ringed by a splatter of "tasty avocado." 

***

There is barf on the sleeve of my blazer and a splatter of pee soup on my T-Shirt. "I smell," I told my friend Dina, while trying to explain why we would have to reschedule our playdate. 

"Seriously, I smell like barf."

This was minutes after I peeked into the backseat of my car to see a strange brown stain on Huds' new black sweater. When the acrid, vomit smell wafted to the front, I pulled over onto the side of the road and tried to fish my pink little boy out of a festering pool of regurgitated soup (I plopped him, half naked, back into the car seat, where he happily slept until we got home).

My life is a mess. 

People warned me that having kids was a dirty job, but I wasn't prepared to NEVER have a stain-free pair of jeans again. What I wouldn't give for a piece of furniture without a dark splotch on it somewhere. 

And the boy is only seven months old! There are years of filth-making to come.

Still so close to my former life, I can almost smell the cleanliness of those sanitized old days - that lemony, soapy, shower-y fresh hair smell  - that used to emanate from my clothes and person. 

And when he was just a tiny, teeny boy - like three months ago - Huds didn't have prune crust around his nose all the time. He spit up so rarely I thought how lucky I was to have spawned the Downy baby. 

Now those days are behind us. Well behind us. 

Everything has been replaced with the faint smell of sour breastmilk. 

"Messy is the new sexy!" I proclaimed to my friend Naomi. "Like fifty is the new forty. Plaid is the new black... is it? I'm so out of touch, I have no idea if it is or not, but you get the idea."

When I was little, I remember how my mom's shirt always had some stain on it. Or her pants were marred by a splatter of something or other here or there. 

I vowed never to let that happen to me..... 

Vows are meant to be broken, I guess.