St. Daycare

Put it on the list of things I thought I’d never do. Consider sending my kid to Saint Anywhere. Daycare. Part time. Not easy to find. Even harder to pay for. But possibly the ease in my week that could build a kinder, gentler mommy, one who talks to adults sometimes and combs her hair. The daycare that might work the best is attached to a church. Not a church I am part of, would be part of, or even know anything about, really. What harm can they do to one-year-olds? my husband shrugs. Okay, I tell him, but we’d have to find somewhere else for him to be in a year or so, my religion meter blinking red. What harm can they do to two-year-olds? my husband persists. I don’t know the answer. I have a year to figure it out.

Now I know that that bullshit line that was popular with righteous moms some years back, maybe still is, about people having kids so that “someone else can raise them,” is truly absurd. Naturally, I had a kid so that my unrealized dreams could evenutally alight somewhere and I could extend my mortal life through this recomposite of my genes, but that’s neither here nor there…This job is 24-7. Most days it feels more like 29-12. And the idea that if my kid goes to daycare for 7-2, interacts with other children his age, is introduced to other adults’ style of being in the world, I am somehow shirking my responsibility is just part of the lie machine that churns, I’d say, at least 24-7.

So why do I feel guilty considering it? Fuck. They got me. I’m spinning. The machine is dropping lies ticker-tape style from the sky, like invisible petals printed with doomed fortunes. We get zero help in how to keep from losing our minds – to boredom, toddler logic, or the factory model society we move in. We really have to be ever-vigilant in our quest for sanity, creativity, and time to blow our noses. Perhaps St. Daycare can save my soiled soul, or at least that of my offspring.