Baby stalker by JULIET WATERS A couple of weeks ago a married mother confessed to me that she sometimes had fantasies of going to prison just to get a minute to herself. Solitude is the major bonus of having joint custody of a baby. I love Ben more than anyone or anything, but I also really love the 30 hours a week he spends with his father. Once you have a child, every moment seems precious, particularly those away from the child. Currently I'm on "vacation" at my parent's country place in Maine. I was looking forward to this chance for us to spend some real quantity time together, but now the reality that many mothers do this for years, not weeks, really scares me. This will sound very terrible and cynical, but somebody finally has to speak the truth. There should be headlines in newspapers on every day that a mother doesn't off her child. I admit it, I'm relatively spoilt. F takes Ben for two six-hour blocks during the week and an overnight from Friday to Saturday. Mostly I use this time to work, since Ben's still on a waiting list for daycare. But I also use it to write, meditate and drink. I sometimes make plans Friday night, but I'm usually pretty happy passing out over an empty can of Guiness, 40 minutes into The Gilmore Girls. Then there's Saturday morning: the golden hours. This is when I get to lazily read the newspapers, have brunch with friends, have uninterrupted conversations and the use of both hands. The little things that childless people take for granted. After the first week of full time Ben, I decided the problem wasn't just that he's always there. My parent's take him for an hour or two a day and that's enough to keep me from overdosing him with his homeopathic teething medicine. No, the problem is that his attitude toward me radically changed once he realized that his slave woman is only a cry away. He's become His Majesty, The Baby. He's unabashedly manipulative, and I am impotently susceptible to his demands. But after the second week, I started to sense an increased desperation in him. Suddenly my baby is my stalker. My new theory is that he misses his father. Ben acted this way, I now remember, when I took a vacation from mothering. Here's another perk of joint custody: a couple of months ago I took an extended baby break and came down here by myself for five days. According to F he was normal for the first two days, but after that he started freaking out any time F left his eyesight. I don't much like this theory. There was a mean little part of me that secretly hoped Ben would just think of his father as an exceptionally great babysitter, but never someone he would actually miss the same way he missed me. I figured that maybe, when he was about four, he might learn some kids live with their fathers all the time. This time of crisis would be resolved with a nice little talk, in the roughly the same time it would take to fix things on an episode of Party of Five. Now in week three of my vacation, I'm starting to figure out how mothers who live with their babies all the time do it. They adapt. I've learned that the beach is nature's daycare centre. Ben can play with seaweed for a good hour, and sand is the perfect place for him to practice his lurching (that which is in between the crawling and walking stage). And I've realized that if I put his porta-crib under a skylight he's quiet and happy for a good 15 minutes. And I'm enjoying life while being savagely exhausted. Still, I'm looking forward to getting back to work so I can get some rest. "I, Single Mum" will appear monthly