Notes from Baby Jail

When raising children becomes a solitary act, time changes shape.

original image by Jonathan Borba

"Should we go out?" we look at each other with a deep, guilty hope that the other feels the same. The question hangs in the air like a soap bubble – entrancing, fragile, and destined to pop.

My day started at 4:30 AM when my youngest decided he'd had enough sleep, and it was officially playtime. It is now 8:00 PM, the kids are asleep, and my visiting mother-in-law has kindly volunteered to be on baby monitor duty. The world of unhurried evenings still exists somewhere: in theaters where the only drama is scripted, in concert halls where the only crying is cathartic, and in restaurants where meals are measured in courses rather than minutes. But we'd both rather crawl into bed, our bodies heavy with the accumulated gravity of countless early mornings. Tomorrow is likely to start somewhere between 4:00 and 5:00 AM.

"Maybe it's better if we just go for a quick lunch one of these days."

It's day 1,314 of Baby Jail, and the inmates are consigned to it.

Baby Jail is a condition in 21st-century parenting that arises from either lack of or distance from family (we suffer from both), a failure to invest in and cultivate your "village," budget constraints in accessing a village-for-hire, or simply, tiredness. Most likely, a perfect storm of the above. Accute Baby Jail also has both parents working from home, a modern blend of deprivations and privileges that, even though I wouldn't trade them for anything, still comprise a unique form of house arrest.

Anthropologists might call this an "evolutionarily novel" environment - raising children in isolation when our species evolved to do it in groups. The nuclear family is a recent quirk, and sometimes it feels like we're all participating in a massive social experiment, guinea pigs in the laboratory of contemporary parenting. The day-to-day of Baby Jail is like Groundhog Day, but with the added twist that you're not just repeating the same day - you're repeating it while trying to maintain the hologram of your former self, flickering and unstable, in the world beyond these walls.

The cultural discourse around parenthood exists in false dichotomies, like a child's board book where everything must be one thing or its opposite. On one page, you have "relatable mom content", otherwise known as resentment porn, a parade of comically harried mothers stewing in the difference between the drudgery of family life and an idealized alternative where it would (should!) be easy. On the opposite page lurk the representatives of the holy church of smiling martyrdom. Here, motherhood is a privilege, and all sacrifices are easy and very welcome. No emotional expenses spared, no poverty too deep to dull the sheer ecstasy of motherhood. This is motherhood as an art form, and it stands in stark contrast to motherhood as stand-up comedy, which is the pitiable trade of the “relatable” mom. The message thunders like a toddler's demands: enjoy the sacrifice or be damned. These extremes leave little room for most of us, dwelling in that undefined space where motherhood is neither a saintly calling nor a punchline but just the quiet, complex work of raising humans while remaining human.

Like everything in parenting, because the inputs vary wildly, the experience varies, too. Your access to help, your use of money, the children's temperament, your tolerance for danger, and the surrounding culture all flow into the experience of Baby Jail. Some parents find ways to maintain more of their pre-jail identity, while others surrender entirely to the new reality. I’ve been blessed with extremely healthy, highly sex-typical little boys, and my experience of eye-popping vigilance and relentlessness is inevitably colored by it. I sometimes envy the parents of restaurant-proof, silently drawing little beings. Still, my unique perks include the prehistoric roars that test our windows, the superhero launches from couch to couch, the stick collections that could build a forest, and belly laughs that come from nowhere and spread like wildfire.

But for everyone in this phase of life, this is hard. You are not yourself. Fun, precious aspects of you are now vague memories, like toys pushed under the car seat, not sure they'll ever be recovered. Some of this transformation stems from parenthood, and some from the unavoidable act of aging. But beyond both lies this strange, liminal time, like a cocoon stage where you're neither what you were nor what you'll become – except this metamorphosis happens while you're still expected to function in the world, and the stakes are high.

In Baby Jail, there is a lot of time, but not time for a lot. Time comes in pockets of unpredictable length. Enough time to make a sandwich, not enough time to compose an important email. Or, the time is there, but experience has taught you that the focus required to do serious thinking is not a safe state to be in when supervising tempestuous toddlers. They have creatively destructive ideas that materialize within seconds, tiny chaos theorists testing the butterfly effect with your circuit breaker panel. Time is abundant for things that allow for keeping about 50% of your focus on the kids. Some activities adapt well to this fractured attention: 'mom slop' bubbling away in the pressure cooker, but never delicate sautéed vegetables or anything that might combust if unattended for 5 minutes. For instagram scrolled in stolen moments but not for reading a book. A text message composed in thirty-second bursts over forty-five minutes, but never a phone conversation that demands presence. The tasks that survive are those that can weather relentless interruption.

Sociologists call this "contaminated time" - nominally free moments that are perpetually compromised by the mental burden of anticipating the next detour. Your mind has a constantly running background process, like a computer with too many tabs open, monitoring for potential disasters, calculating nap windows, tracking hydration levels, and maintaining an ever-updating inventory of snacks. The mental RAM is almost always at capacity.

The phone is, unfortunately, the perfect companion for Baby Jail. It's portable and can offer a little taste of a fun-ish experience in whatever burst of time you have, a pocket-sized escape hatch you can slip through between diaper changes. Your time is already contaminated by the anticipation that, any moment now, you'll need to stop a tiny hand from sticking a fork into a socket. You might as well contaminate it with leisure, work, or whatever can be done in 2 minutes while hiding in the bathroom. Pay a bill, save a slow cooker recipe, or stare blankly at an email you should have answered a month ago, watching the cursor blink like a judgment delivered in binary. It’s wise to stick to low-investment distractions.

Baby Jail has a strained relationship with agency. Every night, I'm awash in the exuberance of planning out the next day, a sailor charting courses through shifting waters. Sometimes, I even allocate time boxes in vain attempts to claw back the tools of my former life as a productivity enthusiast. Gripping your schedule tightly is a bad idea, though. There's a particular kind of frustrated burnout that only happens when you try to force your straight lines and color-coded idea of what you'll do tomorrow onto the wiggly, kaleidoscopic reality of what your time will actually look like. Your current reality feels like an interruption from your ideal reality, and it can be maddening. The to-do list becomes more of a wish list now, a loose menu of possibilities. To pin hopes on specific hours is to court exasperation.

Only when the kids are securely in the custody of another person does the old-timey time restart, like a clock that suddenly remembers how to kickstart its gears. There’s a brief, scrambling adaptation period, a deep breath, a scanning of whatever list you might have produced in a previous window of continuity, and then a race to cram everything into the two-hour slot. You’re trying to drink from a fire hose of agency, while simultaneously remembering how to swallow.

The irony is that the very condition you need to escape from - this state of depletion and fragmented attention - drains the resources you'd need to engineer that escape. The bootstraps are in tatters, consumed in the daily work of protecting the most precious people in your world from harm and the surprisingly complex task of convincing them to eat their tater tots with expertly hidden veggies.

But here's the thing about Baby Jail that took me a few years to understand: it's not just a holding pattern. Something is happening in these meandering, groundhoggy days: a pearl forming around a grain of sand. Our brains are rewiring and developing new capabilities for multitasking, emotional attunement, and presence. We're being forced into a different relationship with time itself, one that's less about productivity and more about presence, less about achievement and more about attendance.

Baby Jail is temporary, but we've been here for years, marking time in first words and first teeth. We've paid a cost for these years but gained the world. The desire to reclaim pieces of our former selves doesn't diminish our commitment to this new, life-giving role. Sometimes, we're merely surviving, participants in some extreme endurance sport we didn't exactly know we were signing up for - and that's perfectly normal.

Admitting to imperfection, to wearing the chaos like a borrowed coat, feels like showing up to the mommy wars with a butter knife. The very act of voicing these challenges invites accusations of complaints, ingratitude, and failure. You are an apostate from the high church of contented martyrdom or condemned to the musty basement of “funny” performative discontent. Yet here I am in Baby Jail, with nowhere else I'd rather be, occasionally rattling the bars and dreaming of what could lie beyond them if I had the energy to take a peek.

Maybe that's the real gift of Baby Jail: it teaches us to hold contradictions like we hold our children - firmly but gently, with both strength and tenderness. To be both trapped and free, depleted and enriched, lost and found. To understand that transformation doesn't always feel transformative in the moment. Sometimes, it just feels like another 4:30 AM wake-up call, another meal in the pressure cooker, another pocket of delightfully contaminated time.

They say the days are long, but the years are short (in Baby Jail). What they don't tell you is that the days are also wide and deep and strange, full of tiny moments that reshape you when you're not looking. Like developing photos in a darkroom, you can't see the image while you're in it. But someday, with my coffee finally hot, I suspect I'll look back and recognize this time for what it was: not just carrying on, not just the endless cycle of snacks and naps, but a slow-motion metamorphosis.