Maternity Leave Goals - Learning Something New

Sabrina stretches her spine tall in her desk chair and nervously feathers her unkempt bangs with her left hand. She hasn’t showered in three days and she feels bad about it. She feels greasy even with the dry shampoo she loaded into her hair.

Her dominant hand grasps a freshly sharpened pencil and she taps it nervously on the crisp notepad she bought from the store yesterday. She felt proud for making it out of the house.

Her chair teeters and totters on the uneven parquet floors in her makeshift office that is really just a corner in her embarrassing kitchen. It isn’t a white twinkling over-the-top marble-sparked kitchen like my friends all seem to have, she thinks sullenly, it’s brown.

Sabrina smiles into the ugly brown kitchen. Silence. The quiet makes her feel like she is on vacation.

Day one. First class.

It feels good to be back at my desk. She breathes in and out slowly, relaxing herself, just like her therapist taught her.

A baby monitor sits silently in front of her computer screen. Sabrina stares at the screen, admiring her newborn daughter, bundled up like a little pink burrito. No blankets or pillows in sight, just like the book told her. Just a swaddle. The baby is asleep.

Sabrina’s stomach drops as she stares closely at the screen. She can’t see her baby’s chest rising and falling like she can when she’s with her. She fights the urge to run up the stairs to her nursery and rest her thumb on her delicate chest.  A simple pulse check.

She glances at her watch.

Her zoom is set to start in less than one minute, so she fights the urge to flight and instead ticks the wheel on the monitor up a smidge to full volume.

She has waited a long time to take this class.

Top of the bucket list, she reminds herself, is learning a foreign language. She paid for unlimited classes for two months. A splurge. Self-care.

Unless she has more children she knows she likely won’t have twelve weeks off from work again. This time is a once-in-a-lifetime luxury. They need her income. Her new husband cannot seem to keep steady work, though he is working today, thankfully.

Sabrina’s eyes shift away from her sleeping baby to her computer screen. The little blue logo spins endlessly.

Waiting for the host to join.

A bead of sweat rolls down the small of her back and gets lost in the waistband of her too-tight jeans.

Why did I wear jeans? She thinks to herself in despair. Her organs are achy.

Sabrina squirms and slides a finger into her bursting waistband, and tries to make room for her now oversized everything. She stifles a yawn.

The logo stops spinning. A festering itch inside her left nostril demands action just as the host lets her into the room.

"Buenos Dias!" a blurry fuzzy-haired lady yells happily as Sabrina slams her slippery fingers onto her lap.

Little boxes fill her computer screen with blurry smiling humans. They look like prisoners in isolation, Sabrina thinks with a grin. She writes the word prisoner on her empty paper and wonders about the Spanish translation. Maybe she will ask during her class. She underlines it twice.

The fuzzy-haired lady starts to fly through the words. Sabrina’s pencil snaps to attention.

"Como te llamas?" the fuzzy-haired lady asks enthusiastically.

Relaxed faces around the prison boxes answer politely, one at a time.

I know this one, Sabrina thinks happily, mi llama es Sabrina.

She writes the words on her notepad and sits tall like a proud statute. She clicks the unmute button just as the baby monitor on her desk lights up like a war-torn nation.

"Me llama es Sabrina," she says quickly over the wail of her precious burrito. Sabrina simultaneously clicks the mute button on her computer screen and dials down the baby monitor on her desk. Her hand accidentally bumps her pencil and it slides then bounces off her desk and rolls across the room and into the hallway. Just out of reach.

My shitty kitchen floors aren’t even, she thinks, rubbing her tired eyes and trying not to fall to pieces.

A tear slips into both of her eyes and hovers.

They threaten to fall. She blinks, three times.

She silently punishes herself for feeling so weak.

Get your shit together, she pleads to herself silently, unsure why she feels like crying.

She hears her name.

"Sabrina! Muy bien!" her virtual fuzzy-haired professor shouts, "De donde eras, mi amiga?" 

Spanish words continue to shoot out of her enthusiastic mouth but Sabrina has lost the thread.  The professor is smiling and saying “Sabrina! Sabrina?”. 

She doesn’t know if it’s a question or a celebration because she mastered “Me llama es Sabrina”.

Her baby keeps crying and the sound reaches a hysterical pitch that Sabrina now recognizes as hunger.  Why is she always hungry? Sabrina wonders to herself. Sabrina’s brain starts to throb.

This is her second week of maternity leave. She has just over 10 weeks to go. Plenty of time to learn a foreign language, she reminds herself, plenty of time to tackle my bucket list.

She sits up tall.

She pushes her sticky hair out of her face.

She stares at the prisoners all staring at her but she doesn’t know what to say. Several of them lean in, eagerly awaiting her answer, smiling at her, but Sabrina doesn’t know what the fuzzy-haired lady asked her. 

Panic starts to swell in her throat and her stomach flip-flops from embarrassment.

"Donde what?" she asks. She breathes. She sets the fiery baby monitor on the floor so she can’t see the lights. It falls over in the direction of the pencil. She kicks it angrily with her foot and the cord falls out.

No more lights.

She can hear her baby’s screeching as the sound spills down the stairs from her sparsely decorated nursery. Sabrina tries to focus on her computer screen and reminds herself of her mother’s wisdom. 

Let the baby cry, her mother told her, bossily, it's how they learn to sleep. Don’t be her pacifier.

Her brain bounces back to her computer screen.

“Donde what?” she asks again.

A square-faced man in a box with round glasses and a plaid shirt points aggressively with both his hands to his ears. The lady in the box beside him looks bored. The box above him looks amused.

"Your microphone is off" the happy professor explains, “nobody can hear you. This is the only time I will speak English in this class.”

Sabrina squirms in her jeans. She slides her finger into her waistband, releases the buttonhole, and lets her stomach breathe. The other organs in her abdomen sigh with relief.

She glances across her drab kitchen and remembers the chaos of last night. Her twin toddler nephews came to meet the baby and they bounced around the room. They were terrible.

My baby will never act like that in someone else’s home, she thinks, confidently.

Ping pong. Ping pong. Ping pong. The file cabinets in her mind open and close.

“Sabrina?”

The cries from upstairs have subsided. Her house is silent but for the unfamiliar words and her name coming fast from her computer.

“Sabrina!, Sabrina?”

Sabrina stands up, knocking her chair onto the floor. She picks up her baby monitor and races up the stairs.

She will learn Spanish tomorrow.