I used to love weekends. For many years, they were the promised land that kept me going through school obligations. I could endure basically any sort of abuse because I knew nothing but my own death could stand between the weekend and me. The weekend activities were what you would imagine for a heavily depressed teenager from my time: sleep until 1 pm, watch films, eat, gain weight, develop an eating disorder, and live on Facebook. It was glorious. Until I entered my gotta-earn-money years. The job that kept me afloat financially implied I had to spend every other weekend locked up in a pharmacy dispensing benzodiazepines and SSRIs to many people, most of them far into their sixties or seventies. That’s a sophisticated way to crush any nineteen-year-old’s soul.
I got my weekends back at twenty-two and had a wonderful run of seven years of leisurely weekends. Of course, then came my pregnancy. I had my son at twenty-nine. And weekends turned into something sour (more than bittersweet) again. At the beginning of the experience, I couldn’t understand what was going on, so every day was a blur of breastmilk, constant wakings, excruciating fear, and hormonal imbalance. Then, when my son was four months old, we hired a nanny to help me out so I could write a little bit more. But of course, whenever Friday rolled around, I would be plagued with an anxiety I wouldn’t accept as such. Do I hate weekends now that I have my son? Well, for a good year, I did hate weekends. But I was too ashamed of myself to admit it. I can’t stand this, a weekend with a baby isn’t a weekend, I would whine in the bathroom as my eight-month-old would do just about the same, only louder, a few feet away from me.