Making Time

Trading in a busy nightlife for motherhood has been an upgrade, but it has still left me with feelings of isolation and loss.

Before Covid, I did standup comedy 6-7 nights a week, sometimes multiple shows per night. I took pride in nights when I would have 2 or 3 sets between open mics and booked shows. My husband and I both did standup as frequently as we could, in addition to the 40-50 hours we each worked per week. This chaotic schedule made sense for us, because we both understood why the other person was sacrificing one-on-one time with each other for nights spent outside of bars, chain smoking cigarettes, mostly watching other people perform and waiting for it to be each of our turns. It was exactly where we needed to be.

For 5 years, my husband and I did comedy too much, to the point that it resembled a compulsion. I skipped family events that I should have attended. When old friends were in town, I invited them to comedy shows instead of carving out time to catch up. I prioritized stage time above anything else in my life. It wasn’t healthy for my mind or my relationships, but more urgently, it was very bad for my body.

This period of my life (age 26-31) was extremely booze-and-cigarette-centric. I stayed sober for work, and mostly sober until performed each night, but I rewarded myself in excess after each set for what was, in retrospect, not an accomplishment. I was constantly hungover or drunk. I went to work stinking of cigarette smoke and alcohol. I drank off hangovers almost every night. I showed up to funerals, christenings, and important meetings looking and feeling obliterated. I acted irrationally even when I was sober, because I was so emotionally discombobulated from the combined toll of alcohol and lack of sleep.

When I reflect now on that stretch of life from ages 26-31, I see that I was unwell. Things didn’t feel so dire, because there were also a lot of positives: I was showing up to work on time (mostly), and despite my best efforts, I got promoted. I was growing as a comedian and managing to travel a little bit to do comedy. Most importantly, I was in a stable relationship with someone I loved.

My husband and I met doing open mics. We started comedy within 3 months of each other. It would be cute if I remembered a lot of the details, but as I may have mentioned, we were drinking a lot. I have a fuzzy memory of him outside of an open mic, telling me that he liked me as more than a friend, on September 9, 2015. One day, I’d like to write more extensively on the sweet, romantic gestures and funny stories that happened early in our relationship. For now, I’ll just say that things progressed quickly. We got engaged on the last day of 2017, and we got married in September 2019. As you know, Covid shut down the world 6 months later.

The focal point of our life was canceled for us for the foreseeable future. For a couple weeks, I was miserable. I left the house only to buy more and more boxed wine and cigarette cartons, loosely envisioning a version of the apocalypse that was closer to a hurricane party than a pandemic. Once I began to process what was actually happening, two things hit me hard. The first was that comedy was not going to be a part of my life for foreseeable future. The second was that I needed to change the bad habits that I’d cemented into my life.

I decided to quit smoking on April 5, 2020. In order to quit smoking, I had to quit drinking. I knew my departure from alcohol would be temporary, but the two vices were too intricately woven in my life to be disconnected individually. I worked out constantly. I went to AA online once, and I felt guilty about it, because I knew I would likely drink again (and I do, but much less than I did before). Somehow, it worked. Without alcohol, I was able to resist the temptation to smoke cigarettes. Drunk with achievement, I decided it was time to get pregnant.

Motherhood had loomed over me for years an impossibility that I knew I needed. We had talked before we got married about wanting kids, but not with any sense of urgency. I told my husband that I thought we should start trying now, since it would take a while. I’d had some medical issues with my reproductive system in the past, and I really thought it would be difficult for us to conceive. I got pregnant the first month we started trying.

I couldn’t believe it. I was a little nervous, but my husband was terrified. I realize now that I had been mentally preparing my entire life to be a mom. I had been soaking up quiet, hungover Saturdays that we spent in bed, knowing these would end once we became parents. I tried to stop time when we smoked cigarettes on the couch, binge-watching prestige television on nights we weren’t at open mics. “This won’t be forever,” I had noted solemnly to myself.

My husband had not been jotting down mental notes, or mentally preparing at all for the way that parenthood would transform every aspect of our lives and selves. Oscar was born on April 6, 2021, a year to the day after I quit smoking cigarettes. Parenthood hit us hard.

You can find all the stuff about delivering my baby here, breastfeeding stuff here , and some nicer stuff about being a mom here. The through line in everything I’ve said and written about motherhood is that it is profoundly difficult in ways I wasn’t expecting.

I knew I’d be exhausted, but I didn’t know I’d feel so alone. I knew sex would be painful, but I didn’t know I’d feel completely detached from my body, disgusted by the thought of myself as a sexual being. I knew mothers had it harder than fathers, but I didn’t suspect that my husband would become distant and unfeeling when I desperately needed someone to care for me¹. I knew I would go back to work after 12 weeks, but I didn’t know how exquisite heartbreak could be until I met my son and imagined handing him to a stranger.

I learned to outsource motherhood to daycare workers, however begrudgingly. The first year of work and daycare was too brutal to rehash, but we got through it. I thought sending him there would be easier once he was older. He is 2 now, and in some ways, it is easier. He tells me his friends’ names, and he tells me about the daily drama. I know he loves his teachers, and they love him back. The hard part is that hanging out with him is only getting more fun. As he becomes more independent, my desire to be near him only grows. The best part of being a mom has been realizing that my son is really good company.

For the past few weeks, he’s been singing along to “Monster in the Mirror” on repeat, every night. He screams “WUBBA YOU! I WUBBA YOU!” 20 seconds after Grover says it in the song, stomping his feet and trying to jump around, too trepidatious to get two feet off the ground simultaneously. He puts his arms behind his back and runs in circles, demanding, “Daddy, DANCE!” if he sees us sitting on the sidelines. He is just the cutest, sweetest, funniest little guy I have ever met in my life. His dad and I marvel at him every day.

My husband and I often calculate how many “good hours” we have with our kid when he isn’t at daycare or sleeping, and it’s not enough. Bedtime is sacred. Obviously, standup comedy also occurs at night.

I did my first booked standup show in June 2021, a year and 3 months after the last show I did before the pandemic. I hadn’t slept in weeks, and I had forgotten how to exist in public. Covid/social anxiety was exacerbated by lack of sleep. I was over eager in conversation, appeared manic on stage, and my thoughts rambled and trailed in circles through the speakers. People in the audience looked confused. I was sober, but I didn’t feel that way. Sleep deprivation and alcohol have really similar effects. Still, I did it. I had shown my face, and I immediately realized that I missed standup a lot more than I thought I would.

I haven’t managed to do standup enough to get back to where I was pre-pandemic. I was a very competent performer. Now, I regularly bomb. I get flustered when jokes aren’t working, I forget punchlines, and I get sloppy and unfocused. I am restarting standup as a new person. I like who I am much more than who I used to be, but I definitely used to be better at comedy.

When I lament the fact that I barely do standup any more, friends offer to babysit. This is very kind, but lack of childcare isn’t a huge problem for me. Theoretically, my husband could do bedtime more than he does, our either of our parents could watch our son.

If you are my friend and you’re reading this, thank you for offering to babysit. I have taken you up on it in the past, and I will do so again in the future. I am so grateful for the people in my life that have made such an effort to be present for me in person, in texts, in instagram dm’s, and in free babysitting. I couldn’t be luckier. Still, when it comes to deciding how to spend my evenings and nights, I have to let intuition do a lot of the heavy lifting.

When presented with the choice to do something outside of my home, intuition often tells me to be with my son. This is often met with skepticism that I am a victim of “mom guilt.”

We live in a society wherein women are made to feel guilty for stepping out of assigned gender roles, especially once they become moms. So it makes sense that when I talk about missing aspects of my pre-baby life, other moms tell me not to let “mom guilt” get in the way of doing things to nourish and enrich myself as a human being. They are correct to suspect that guilt is playing a role, and I am grateful for their vigilance. But guilt honestly isn’t what’s keeping me home at night.

Currently, I skip bedtime 0-2 nights week, usually to do standup. My husband and I try to do roughly the same amount of comedy shows to avoid feelings of resentment about one person getting more stage time than the other. I still feel deeply the loss of the person I used to be before I was a mother. Outweighing that grief is a larger, more ever present feeling of gratitude and pride in my new identity.

I am someone who hasn’t had a cigarette in over three years. I am someone who wakes up without hangovers and gets to work on time. I am someone who packs my own lunch, as well as my son’s, every day. I put appointments on our shared google calendar, in my planner, and on my desk calendar. I am someone that felt impossible to me in 2018, but that I knew I wanted. I am Oscar’s mom, and I am exactly where I need to be.

1. This is an oversimplification for a complicated time in our lives. I hope that one day, I write a separate post to discuss how my husband and I dealt with the first few months of parenthood. He’s a good, kind person, but these were not his best days. They weren’t mine either, but I was the one who had just birthed a baby.