Managing work as a new mother

How does one keep their professional lives thriving while tending to a newborn? Well, we figure out our own hacks and plan ahead

The recurring question in most every conversation with other mothers my age who are either nursing infants or caring for toddlers is, quite simply—how do I manage to work while mothering? My go-to answer is that I don’t have a choice. Because I have only lived here for two years and haven’t had a full-time job, I am infinitely less privileged than anyone who might have had even the most basic occupation which would have guaranteed me some form of paid maternity leave. Italian laws are not as generous to mothers as other European countries. The higher cost of living also means that hired help is unaffordable. I confess I feel envy when I meet other mothers in the region who get to enjoy certain luxuries to which I am simply not entitled. Additionally, most of them have had their mothers or siblings help them ease into parenthood. My in-laws had COVID one after the other soon after our child’s birth, which made them inaccessible to us for almost three weeks. When my partner exhausted his 10-day paternity leave, it meant that from the time he began his work day, at noon, until 7.30 pm, I was alone with our child.

One of my coping mechanisms involved clearing my plate in the final two months of pregnancy. I refused work that didn’t pay enough, which nonetheless resulted in financial loss, but I had better paying work lined up from my third month postpartum that would put me back on track. In the past two months, despite all the challenges of tending to a newborn—and I had many, from recovering from a C-section to not having enough milk and having to pump every three hours while also feeding and caring for our child to having to manage an overactive letdown—I have continued to send these weekly dispatches and write my monthly art criticism essays for the online publication for which I am a contributor. I have also been simultaneously working on my archive, as well as two publications that I must put to bed by the first week of May—the first, a mock-up of my thesis that was the basis of my residency at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, the second, the culmination of my jam documentation project in Tramin, the Traminer Marmaladen Almanach.

My biggest ally has been our weekly planner. We keep it in our living room so we can access, easily, our daily appointments. This analogue form is more practical than Google calendar. Seeing the calendar each time we pass by helps us plan better and be more coordinated. In its vicinity is a planner in which I write down our meal plans. It ensures our kitchen is well-functioning since we share cooking duties. For instance, yesterday afternoon my partner cooked dal and rice. In the evening I simply repurposed the leftover dal, kneading it with flour to make parathas. Since I had a pack of yoghurt in the fridge, I decided to make Punjabi kadhi knowing that we could finish the leftovers for lunch the next day, alongside rice. I sustain our kitchen the way I learned from my father—we shop for vegetables at the weekly farmer’s market in Neumarkt. We buy fish from the Friday pop-up stand and freeze portions of it. I buy meat from the butcher once a week so we’ve enough for three meals. This way our fridge is well-stocked for at least a week. Because we don’t have a dishwasher, we cook meals that don’t require too many dishes. Having an efficient system makes cooking less of a chore and more integrated into our routine.

My other hack involved merging the nursery with my work room. This involved stationing our child’s crib behind my writing desk and next to the spare bed. We sleep here at night, and during the day I am able to be around him as he naps—which is when I work. On one of the walls I have a dupatta hung up upon which I clip pages—print-outs or handwritten notes—of ideas that occupy my mind or excerpts from my own writing or other books. This means that each time I am putting our child to sleep I can read these notes and engage with them mentally so I can structure my thoughts. I manage my other reading by keeping the books open, face-down, so I can easily pick up from where I left off. I try to schedule my calls while I’m breastfeeding during the day and I put the phone on speaker so I’m hands-free. 

I am fortunate, though, that by our fifth week we were able to fall into a healthy night time routine and that his feeding time has shortened from 30 minutes to just 10. I am thus able to sleep well, since our awake windows have been dramatically truncated. The first four weeks were the hardest, since I frequently had to write under conditions of severe sleep deprivation. Care-giving has gotten significantly easier since then. 

I begin my work day during his first nap, which is when I consult my personal planner, which I keep on my desk in which I designate my tasks for the day. I don’t overload myself with too much. I write when he is asleep or when my partner has taken him out for a long walk. I don’t procrastinate like I did before, because time is so much more of the essence than ever before. There’s a purposefulness to my labour, because I know I will be needed again. 

These are some of my hacks. I’m sure I’ll have to keep improvising as I go along. I remember Toni Morisson saying in an interview that she preferred to wake up at 4 am to write, before anyone referred to her as mother. Every successful text I write feels like an act of rebellion against the world’s attempt to muzzle my maternal subjectivity. 

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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