Everyday I'm hustling

Here's one question a woman post-partum dreads more than "when are you having your next baby?": "When are you going back to work?" To a mom on maternity leave from her full-time job, this question might make her guilt-ridden as she thinks about leaving her newborn baby in someone else's care. To a mom who's decided to quit her job to care for her child, this question might make her feel worthless, bristle and think, "Ain't I working now?" For me, it opened a whole can of worms. My work situation was so confusing. First, I'd been laid off at seven months pregnant from a job that I had spent 11 years working to acquire. I rose to the top and fell in three months due to a faltering industry. Second, I nearly immediately took a freelance editing gig for an upstart real estate magazine, despite promises to everyone and God that I was going to give myself time to read, write, bake, take long strolls, and, of course, care for the baby. I considered the gig a fun thing to do and bonus money. This is why I never really considered it working, because to me work means showering, putting on heels and going to an uncomfortable office with people you typically don't really like. Thus, the week we brought Adeline home, there I was with only two hours of sleep, scraggly hair and a nursing baby attached to me, trying to edit. Although stressful, there was a part of me that clung to the job because it was the only thing familiar at a time when everything else was completely foreign. I was caught in a strange land, between professional woman with people to manage and a task list a mile long and new mom with spit up running down her back, no make up on and a screaming infant. It seemed to me that I wanted to be both people. I wondered how long I could keep it up. Mind you, I had no child care. So, when people asked THAT question, it made me feel all the things both a working and a non-working mom felt: Guilty for neglecting her cries while I tried to finish an e-mail; longing for the full-time immediate feedback one gets in an office; and stressed trying to juggle laundry and libel law in one afternoon. I could have given the gig up at any point in the early weeks, but I stuck in there, knowing that we needed the money. I was trying to buy myself time. Although painful to work in those first few weeks, I also knew that it would be harder for me to stick her in daycare and head off to a full-time office job five months after she was born. Eventually, it wore on me, though, and after much thought, I raised my rate and the publisher decided I had become too expensive. Again, I promised to take three months off to run, play with Adeline, garden, bake and write. Yet, I haven't given myself much time to breathe. I have this innate impulse to always be hustling for work. I started working at the age of 8 when I opened my own car wash business, JC Buckets and Rags, and cleaned all the neighbors cars on Sundays for $5 per vehicle. I also house sat for people, watered lawns and baby sat. When I got my work permit at the age of 14, I immediately got a job doing inventory at the beauty supply store where my sister and her friends worked. I sat on a crate in a basement underneath the mall counting Matrix, Nexus and Biolage bottles for hours. I eventually worked my way upstairs to the sales floor and really haven't stopped holding down jobs since. Even when I was laid off from my dot-com job I didn't take a pause. My friend Aimee and I were given brown paper bags and Cobra insurance packets along with 50 others as our dot-com disaster of a job sent us packing. They claimed to have run out of money, which was easy to understand seeing as though we ordered a king's ransom worth of Dorritos and beer from Webvan every week. The next day Aimee and I were employed at a weekly newspaper on the Peninsula, despite the fact that the night before we drank ourselves silly discussing our newfound freedom. Today, I find myself in a bit of a bind. I didn't choose not to work, as most new moms might. I sort of got forced into unemployment, and although I do have a full-time employer named Adeline Isabel Aquino I can't shake the feelings of inadequacy. So, the day after I promised to take it easy, I found myself on Craigslist hustling again. I don't know how I plan to manage this, seeing as though I haven't ironed out big issues, like child care. In my dream world, someone would find me terribly fascinating, pay me gobs of money to write about my life, and allow me to work from home. They'd throw in free child care and allow me enough paid time off every year to travel for three months. I haven't found that gig yet, though. So, I'll keep hustling.