This Week On The (Dr.) O’C: The “L” Word
You’ve got to love happy endings. In what could be Dr. O’C’s final post here on A Free Man, we get just that…
At some point my attitude to motherhood started to improve. I don’t know when that happened, but it did. I am a better mum than I thought I would be. For the first few months, I would tell Z that I loved him, over and over but I don’t really think I meant it. I said it more to convince myself of that fact. I know that I was meant to feel this unconditional love for him. Instead I didn’t really feel anything for him. Sure he was a cute baby and it was nice when he smiled, but it could have been any baby.
Initially we had planned that I would take 4-5 months off work, but when February loomed I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t put this helpless individual into day care 10 hours a day. I didn’t know how it would work. How would I get up, walk the dog, get Z and myself dressed and out the door. Plenty of people do it. I just didn’t know how it would work for me. It comes back to my fear of new things or a new way of doing things. A fear I never knew I had before Z was born. I walk the dog the same route every morning. I get up, walk dog, shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, dry hair and leave for work. In that order, every morning. I don’t think I ever changed it. It was the most efficient way of starting my day. But looking back, was I inflexible and stuck in my ways? With Z, although it took a long time to establish, I was used to doing things a certain way and couldn’t imagine fitting work into it. I also couldn’t imagine that I would be comfortable leaving him with anyone else.
The irony of the situation is that before I got pregnant and even during my pregnancy I worried if I was capable of taking a whole 4 months off work. I thought that would be pushing the limits of my sanity. I am a social person, I love to talk, interact with people and find out about them. But mostly I knew that I would go insane if I stayed at home with a baby (and I kind of did). If Chris could have taken paternity leave, I think that we would have both jumped at the chance. And now here I was, not wanting to go back to work because I was both afraid of the logistics of doing what millions of people do every day, getting themselves and a baby ready and out the door in the morning and I was getting attached to this little person, whom I had had very little emotional connection with so far.
Chris and I had been discussing a move to Australia for a while. Well to be honest, Chris was ready to go, but I loved my job and had negotiated a promotion for when I returned from maternity leave. Problem was this promotion almost certainly required me to travel internationally every month. Not something that was going to work with a small baby. I know my company would have worked with me and changed the job, but to be honest I was probably looking for an excuse not to go back. An excuse to not change my finely tuned routine and put Zach in the care of strangers. Pathetic I know. Instead of getting into a new routine of going back to work, I embark on a trans-continental move, involving two adults, a baby and a dog. What the hell was I thinking?
I was thinking that it would be nice to be home after 8 years spent overseas. It would be nice that Z has family around. A Nana whom he adores and who gives him sups of tea and biscuits, who he goes crawling half way across the house to when he hears her saying ‘Nana Nana Nana’. (She is determined that they be his first words). It would be nice to have someone to tell me how to do things. Simple things like when it is safe to give Z a piece of bread and not choke, when he is sick enough that he needs to see a doctor. Someone to baby sit so Chris and I could have a night out, go see a movie, have a meal. Someone who cares and loves him as much as we do. It would be nice to be around friends who are having babies who Zach will grow up alongside.
Don’t get me wrong, the move was incredibly stressful. I was moving home, but Chris was moving to a place he had never visited, a place where I grew up, knew people, had extended family. I didn’t really know what the job market was like for either of us. I didn’t know if Chris would like it. I felt like if it didn’t work out for us that it would be my fault, that we would have wasted the better part of $15K moving our life here and worse still, we wouldn’t be in the financial position to do anything about it. Dealing with importation of a dog into Australia is not an easy thing, not to mention importing Chris! It might actually have been easier in hindsight to stay in Oxford.
But things have worked out so far. Chris has got two jobs, both in areas he wanted to explore and on Monday I started a new job, a good job doing exactly what I had hoped I could do when I came back to Adelaide. The next few months aren’t going to be easy, getting up, walking the dog, getting myself and Z fed and dressed, and out the door. Not to mention establishing myself in a job that is challenging and WAY out of my comfort zone. But I have more confidence that it will be ok. That I can do it. That Z will adapt.
I really didn’t think that having a baby would teach me anything about myself, that it would reveal numerous faults. And in those early few months, I didn’t ever think I would get to the stage where I would look at my baby, my son and say I love you and actually mean it.
Now, about that final post thing. I can’t convince Dr. O’C of anything, not for lack of trying. But maybe you all can. I’ll leave it in your hands to persuade her to keep writing.
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Now, this kind of thing can be taken a bit too far. The slightly manic freecycling reminded me of something I saw on the TV the other day. Dr. O’C occasionally gets me sucked in to her trashy programs - one of these is “Wife Swap. The American version is better, there is just a bigger pool of whackos to choose from, but the British version certainly holds its own. 
Since the decision to leave Oxford became final I’ve begun to appreciate just about everything about it - maybe barring the weather. In the three plus years that we’ve spent here I’ve been able to thoroughly explore this wonderful little city and there are a few places that have become very special to me. So, when 
The ruins of Godstow Abbey sit alongside the Thames just to the north and west of Oxford. It was built in 1139 for the Benedictine nuns and was in use for four centuries until King Henry VIII, in a fury over his excommunication by the Catholic Church, dissolved the order and hundreds of others in 1539. The site became a private home until it was heavily damaged in the English Civil War in the 1640’s. For much of the 17th and 18th centuries, local builders from nearby Wolvercote and Wytham used the ruined nunnery as a source for stone. In the 19th and 20th centuries farmers used the site as a paddock for their livestock and it has degraded to the point that all that remains today is part of the outer wall and the skeleton of the chapel.
It was a rare bright and warm February day in the south of England today so Zach, his Mum, the dog and I headed out on foot from the village of Wytham. It was a little bit of a trudge through muddy pastures but there’s nothing like a ramble through the English countryside on a sunny day and Port Meadow, across the river from Godstow, is one of our favorite places in Oxford.
S
