Ducks in a Row

I was fascinated to learn during pregnancy that, when you have a baby, your organs get rearranged, and it takes some time after delivery for everything to return to order.  The same thing happens with your routine.  Pre-baby, you had all of your ducks in a row, more or less, but then after the birth, a sweet little someone comes along and starts grabbing at them, drooling on them, and generally throwing everything off-kilter.  Don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t trade my baby for anything, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like my structure.

My friend, Nikki—also a first-time mom with a baby born in February, posted the following message to her Facebook timeline back in June:  “It never fails: I spend time getting Silas down for his nap, anticipating all the things I can do while he sleeps. Then he falls asleep sweetly and peacefully in my arms, and I don't want to put him down anymore.”

Though this precious post spoke to how wise my friend is for cherishing each sacred and short-lived second spent snuggling her sleeping son, I must admit that the main thing I identified with was the part where she mentioned mapping out her free time.

Perhaps it was because Alice was an exception to the “eat, sleep, poop” routine that so many veteran moms had alluded to when they came to visit in the early months of her life.  She ate and she dirtied her diapers alright, but she sure didn’t nap well, even when I scrupulously followed the schedule laid out for me in the baby book.  So when I actually did stumble across a short window of slumber time, that baby was out of my arms and back in her bedroom faster than you could say “gone, baby, gone.”

I remember talking about this a few months back with another good friend, Anne, who is also a first-time mom.  We talked about the feeling that overcame us when we actually got some time to ourselves, and that feeling was panic.  You may have expected me to say we let out long sighs of relief or that we churned our arms and barked, “Victory!” like football fans in the grandstands (in hushed tones, of course), but we were more like sitting ducks when it came to being presented with an unexpected break. 

In my own situation, rather than indulging in a sit-down most serene or transforming into a multi-tasking machine, I’d frantically scan the open layout of my apartment, whipping my head from my open laptop on the table to the refrigerator containing my unprepared lunch, to the pile of cold laundry on the couch, to the workout DVDs collecting dust on the entertainment center, to the dust on the entertainment center and everywhere else, to my audio Bible CDs, to the stack of bills on the counter, to the sticky note listing names of family and friends I owed text messages, e-mails, or phone calls, to the bathroom door (because I hadn’t yet decided where changing out of pajamas and putting on makeup fit on the day’s priority list), and so forth and so on.

And even though Alice is napping much better now, system overload continues to overcome me when I finally get time to tackle my to-do list.  It can be hard to choose between taking care of myself, taking care of my relationships, and taking care of the housework, among all the other things.  Do I take the time to make the baby food, that gift, or those cookies to save a few bucks or do I just go to the store and buy the ready-made versions?  Do I try and get supper started while catching up with my long-distance friend on the phone or do I just plan for frozen waffles since I’m not a good listener when I’m otherwise occupied?  Do I stay up late to tie up all of the day’s loose ends, even when I know it’s at the price of being worthless the next day? 

And what about writing?  Is it fair that my slow-processing brain takes hours to put together a piece when the work isn’t generating any immediate source of income?  Or should I be using that time to research my work-from-home options? 

Racing thoughts streak back and forth across my hopped-up mind as I frenziedly try to get away with completing just one more thing.  As I’m penciling on eye liner, that concluding sentence suddenly presents itself to me, and I repeat the words over and over in my head like a lunatic as I apply my eye shadow and mascara, crowding out any other thought so I’ll still remember it by the time I get my hands on top of my laptop’s shiny black keyboard.  And then, by the time I’ve saved that thought in Microsoft Word and freed my captive mind to focus on something else, Alice wakes up from her nap.  I take a deep breath as I raise my hands from the Windex bottle in surrender and allow her persistent cries to trigger my task-targeted brain back into mommy mode.  Sometimes I feel like I’m in a game of Duck Duck Gray Duck, chasing the ever-elusive to-do list round and round in circles.

I can only imagine how much more complicated this could all get with future children…

The funny thing is, as much as the rigmarole overwhelms me, I kind of like it.  Call me an odd duck if you will, but, for the most part, it’s not because of pressure from some outside source that I feel compelled to accomplish every chore.  I take pleasure in the chase.  I like fighting to make order out of chaos.  It’s the same reason I spend so much time trying to wrangle a rough draft into something presentable enough to share with other people.

When I lived in Omaha, I remember seeing a billboard for a website geared towards the city’s moms.  The site was cleverly called “Momaha.com,” and the ad featured an illustration of an aproned, six-armed woman holding a cell phone, a briefcase, a hair dryer, a baby’s bottle, and an oven mitt in her many manicured hands.  Though the logo may have seemed a tad creepy in the same way the popular media moniker, “Octomom,” had always seemed to me, I must admit I kind of liked it.  I wanted to run rampant like Momaha, or even Octomom (minus the whole stripping thing, of course), smiling through the sweat as I strove to keep the plates spinning.

Speaking of plates, I remember feeling this way at my first job as a kitchen worker at Bluewater Covenant Bible Camp.  Normally two of us were on dish duty, but for the supper meal one day, my scheduled partner was nowhere to be found.  Though I felt flustered at the realization that I was on my own as the dishes started pouring through the drop-off window, I also felt strangely invigorated.  Instead of calling out to the staff shooting the breeze in the dining hall, I stubbornly set my mind to do it all myself…before anyone could find out.  And so I juggled both jobs—spraying the dishes off and loading them into the dishwasher, as well as pulling the steaming trays out the other end and putting them away.  I remember the sterile heat burning my fingers as I alternated between stacking the ceramic plates and dessert bowls on the shelf and drawing the dripping, sludge-coated cutlery out of the rinse tubs.  It never occurred to me at the time that what I was doing was highly unsanitary.  I was in headless chicken mode, and all I cared about was getting the job done before someone swooped in and spoiled my rhythm.

With Alice’s ever-changing needs, it can be hard to get into a rhythm, and even harder to maintain it.  I think I’ve got everything figured out one week, only to find that the next, the same routine doesn’t work quite so well.  Aside from taking enjoyment from the game I try to make it, I also try and appreciate the fact that this endless recalibrating is teaching me something.  Lots of things, actually—like common sense, for one thing, which I was obviously lacking back in my dishwashing days.  I’m also learning better time management and prioritization skills—especially when to let things go. 

Though it may irk me when I’m not always achieving my goals in the short-term, I have peace inside that in the long-term, it’s all going to even out.  I’m glad that, early on, someone taught me that it’s impossible to “have it all” at once—that there are different seasons for different purposes, just like Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 3.  I’m glad I grasp that sometimes our ambitions have to temporarily get put on the backburner in order to maintain an overall balance, and that’s OK.  It makes it easier for me to chuckle like a dork and declare, “While they’re pumping iron, I’m pumping calcium!” when I see others out running or headed to the gym and I wish I could join in.  And, like Nikki, it makes it easier for me to set down that thing I’m working on and let my baby rearrange her bookshelf, unfold the laundry, or mow her sweet, slimy mouth all over my freshly-fixed-up face, because, aside from my relationships with the Lord and my husband, this little duck is the most important one of all.