Desperately seeking novelty

Three weeks into my second maternity leave and the baby had still not arrived. But a familiar feeling had. The urge for novelty. I’d managed to keep it at bay for the first two weeks with a structured plan of appointments. Hair cut. Eyes tested. Teeth cleaned. Friends seen. But once those were ticked off, my brain seemed to clamour for more. What now? With no baby in sight, my mind turned to daydreaming and not just any kind. It was the jump-on-a-flight-to-Bali-right-now or head-to-the-Alps-for-a-last-minute-ski-weekend type of excitement I was after. I wanted adventure. I wanted freedom. I wanted stylish new clothes, and fuck it, why not a stylish new kitchen too. I also, specifically, wanted to walk into my favourite art gallery and say: “I want that one” pointing at whatever art I liked and get it, no matter the price.

As I said, this feeling was familiar. On my previous leave, my brain soon began to clamour for it. At the very least, I needed something new daily, a new place to go, a new friend to meet or a new thing to buy. As my funds dwindled, the desire for something fun ratcheted up. As I couldn’t go to as many things because of the cost, I increasingly found that things like conversations took on a new level of expectation. I needed them to be entertaining, amusing, delightful or appalling to feed my starving brain. No pressure then!

It wasn’t as if this feeling entirely went away either when I returned to my job, but my new level of busyness juggling work and childcare meant there was less time to indulge it. I daydreamed about it a bit but couldn’t see how I could fit anything in on my treadmill of responsibility.

Did others feel the same? Surely some did but in my mothers’ groups the conversation never came up and I didn’t quite know how to ask. What I did see were these same people jetting off to lots of different places with their new babies so maybe that was my answer. It certainly made me think that achieving novelty was more a question of funds, and if you didn’t have them then maybe you were destined to be a bit more bored. This made me think of friends who were self employed and didn’t have a big chunk of money behind them to finance their time off. How were they having fun? Or maybe other people were just better at finding joy in things than I was.

Turns out many weren’t or were doing it on a much shorter timescale than me. Some were back at work within three or six months so they could continue funding their lives. Not everyone was having it all.

Then I read broadcaster Emma Barnett’s experience of it in her excellent book, Maternity Service and I felt like I got another perspective about why I might want novelty. She described that feeling of always being “on“ and busy during maternity leave but often not mentally stimulated, which created a strange feeling of disconnect and frustration. It struck a chord.

Her cure for this was also newness but not in my jump-on-a-plane-kind-of-way. I think she described herself as a “social whore”, willing to meet up with anyone, and she talked with excitement about discovering new streets in her neighbourhood as she set out for her daily walks. Maybe I had the answer all along then? Maybe I just needed someone else to voice the same things and signal that it was OK if you can’t do big things. Maybe instead of Bali, it’s camping in Cornwall?! Instead of buying art in a gallery, it’s painting at home. Adjusting expectations. Fuck it, the whole parenting shtick seems to be adjusting expectations, or in the early days, lowering them right to the floor. Maybe I could take a leaf out of this book…