Flashback: The First Few Months

No rest for the wicked. Or the parents.

Every so often another cable news anchor has a baby and throws a huge fit at the state of parental leave in the U.S. And then those of us who don't make enough money to keep half a dozen nannies on retainer point and laugh. A for effort, you have approximated human emotion!

The Nonvoter was born in April of 2012, and that meant no leave. You can't just take off of consulting in April of an on-year. That's game time. That's when everyone buys research. They've had their one decent quarter of fundraising and have a bit of money to spend and oh god the election is in six months we need research! If he had arrived in April of 2011 or 2013 I could have taken as much time as I wanted, because no one hires anyone in April of odd-years. Alas, working like crazy during the on-year is what pays the mortgage in the off-year. So work it was.

It didn't even stop while he was being born. There were calls, there were emails. The only reason I didn't get calls in the middle of making all the family and friends calls was that he was born fairly early in the morning. There was work to do, and I was the only one around to do it. After we visited the Nonvoter in the NICU* for the first time, my wife kissed him and whispered "Daddy has to go hurt bad people now."

It was theoretically going to be okay. We had planned for it. I had moved my schedule and production around, let the appropriate clients know. Because planning is totally a game-changer with babies.

Of course it all went to hell.

2012 was the worst year of my career. It was even worse then 2009, when no Democrat thought they had to spend money on research and no one had money to give them for research anyway. I blew leads. I blew sales. I blew deadlines. I blew one job because I wrote the whole proposal up, carefully proofread it, then forgot to click "send." I found the email three weeks later.

I don't even know how I managed what work I did do. The parent books might be crap but they get one thing right: the first few months sink into a blur pretty quickly. Sometimes I worked during naps. Sometimes it was after bedtime. Sometimes I crawled off to a coffee shop and felt like a total heel. A lot more times than I care to count I wound up throwing myself on the mercy of the client, especially if the client also had kids. I remember exactly one specific thing- the Nonvoter falling asleep in my arm while I read through county board minutes from I forget where with the other. I mostly remember it because I wanted to fall asleep too.

I have no lessons learned here. It sucked, I floundered around a lot and lost potential clients and money. It also worked out okay, which is not nothing. The Nonvoter eventually was okay for minutes and minutes and the Opinion Leader and I learned how set a sort of schedule and otherwise work around him. It wasn't great, but it could have been worse. In the end it was inertia that kept me moving at work. I had been around for two cycles and two cycles is half a career in politics. You can do the job in your sleep after that.

And that's a good thing, because I'm pretty sure that's how I did most of my 2012 work.

*Yeah, there was a trip to the NICU. Thank you American health care system. Seriously.