Groundhog day

I don't mean the date, I'm referencing the movie. You know, where Bill Murray's character is caught in an endless loop, having to relive Groundhog Day over and over again until he gets it right.

I know the feeling.

When I was writing my thesis, the hardest part for me was the repetition. Every single day, I got up in the morning, ate breakfast, wrote, ate lunch, wrote, ate supper, wrote, went to bed. Sure, that was broken up a bit with trips to the office to print or go to a seminar, grocery runs, and throwing out the garbage, but the basic structure of my days never changed. That's why I even stopped keeping a journal - I bored myself with it.

Motherhood, it seems, is no less quotidien. I feed the baby, wipe up the baby's spit, change the baby, wipe up the baby's spit. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This morning, just lifting Jakob from his crib to the change table, he pulled my hair, pinched me, and spat up on me.

I wake up in the morning and think, "Here we go again". My day is shaped out before it even begins. While writing my thesis, I continued my subscription to the Globe and Mail so I could always check the date, even when the days ran together; now I don't even get a chance to look at the paper. Some people take comfort in routine and predictability, I guess, and to the extent that now I can more or less predict when I'll have to feed Jakob, I do too. But the routineness (is that a word? I used to have a good vocabulary...) is draining. There isn't much space left in the day for innovation.