I missed the memo about Hang Time, Taye Diggs, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

So, I’ve spent the last couple of months holed up with my new baby. When I had my first son, I felt that I needed to be fantastically productive during my maternity leave.  I also had a strong desire to get out of the house as much as possible. This time is different. I’m older.  The birth was a bit more strenuous.  And this baby, though very cute and wonderful, is a bit more demanding.  As consequence, I’ve spent a lot of time just sitting around holding my son. On a molecular level, we’ve both been very busy.  Me, making milk and healing my body, and him growing at an exponential rate.  So we’ve been busy.  But there has been a lot of sitting around.

At first, I felt a little guilty.  Shouldn’t I be doing all the stuff I never have time to do when I’m working full-time?  I mean, with all this extra time on my hands, my house should be spotless, I should be trying lots of new recipes, I should be doing post-natal yoga, and I should be writing lots of blog posts.  But then something dawned on me.  Since I will not be having any more kids, until I retire, this is likely the last time in my adult life that I will get to stop working for a good chunk of time.  When that occurred to me, I said to myself, “Fuck it…I’m on vacation.” Sure, I’m busy bonding with my baby and whatnot, but I’ve let go of any expectation that there is going to be anything particularly productive about this maternity leave.  So for my baby son and me, this has been pure hang time.

While I’ve been sitting around, I’ve watched a truly shocking amount of TV, including all six (seriously, six) seasons of “Private Practice.”  I was never a fan of “Grey’s Anatomy”, so how I got sucked into watching its spin-off is somewhat inexplicable, but I think it might have something to do with Taye Diggs.  I mean look at him…

And then there’s the rest of the cast…beautiful people, all.

And the show is pretty much a round robin of these gorgeous people having sex with each other.  Even though the show was mostly just cheesey drama, there was one lovely little moment in which my boyfriend, Taye, really got to me.  Check it out…

As Taye adorably explains, an “Anyway Friend” is a friend who, no matter what you do, will love you anyway.  That’s unconditional love. And unconditional love is hard.  I’m supposed to love my innocent little children unconditionally, and I sure try to, but I have to admit that it feels easier to love them when they’re being good.  That feels kind of conditional, so yeah, unconditional love is hard.

And that brings me to The Unbearable Lightness of Being.*  Set in the former Czechoslovakia, it tells the story of Teresa and Tomas, an unlikely but passionate couple.  They have a dog, named Karenin, to whom they are both pretty devoted.

When Karenin dies, Teresa observes that she did not love Karenin more than she loved Tomas, but she did love Karenin better because she loved Karenin unconditionally.  Teresa’s love for Karenin wasn’t a function of what Karenin did or did not do; Karenin could just be and Teresa would always love her.

Maybe that’s the point of all this hang time…for me and my new baby to just be. Enjoying the hang and memo received.