A few years ago, I checked in with a friend who’d been having a tough time with her high-maintenance newborn. “I don’t even eat until after my husband comes home,” she moaned. “Whenever I put the baby down to fix something, he cries.”
In deference to her hormonal hysteria, I refrained from sharing my immediate reaction: So?
As a new mum, I regularly left my daughter to shriek in her bouncy seat while I scarfed down my lunch or took a shower. Occasional neglect seemed like a relatively minor maternal sin, especially since it was the only way I got anything done around the house. Wasn’t it in my daughter’s best interest to ensure our toilets weren’t condemned by the Health Department?
I developed a habit of lolling around bed in the morning, not responding to my daughter’s cries down the hall until they progressed from gentle mewling to outright fury. And in that spirit, I refused to buy a baby monitor.
These days, it seems, there’s no such thing as an off-duty parent. Even when your children are sleeping, you must remain tethered to them by an electronic gadget, one of those modern-parenting must-haves that our own parents somehow survived without.
More at Original:http://www.babble.com.au/2009/01/02/out-of-sight/
