Happy new year, everyone.
On past NYEs, I’ve set resolutions, and other times when I’ve felt like it was uncool to set a resolution, I’ve set intentions. Sometimes I just call them goals. But it’s all the same, right? Resolutions, intentions, goals — we set them because there are ways we want to be BETTER, and the calendar turning from one year to the next feels like a natural time for a clean slate. So this year, I’m not necessarily making a resolution, but I do want to take advantage of the new year/clean slate to clean up something that’s been feeling messy in my head.
About a month ago, I wrote about Miles and Linnea giving me a sense or order in a chaotic world, and I stand by that idea: There’s something comforting and safe about the fact that whatever your baby or toddler is doing that’s driving you crazy, thousands of other babies and toddlers are doing the exact same thing at the exact same age. And perhaps even more comforting is the truth that they WILL move on from whatever it is, whether it’s biting their friends at daycare or refusing to eat anything but blueberries.
But. BUT. My kids also bring a sense of chaos to a chaotic world. (I have a feeling that may be a more common sentiment, but you tell me.) Yesterday, I was feeling tired and scattered and anxious and I couldn’t exactly put my finger on WHY. There was nothing particularly crazy going on, just a regular day at home with the kids, playing with toy buses and making bottles of formula and making sure Miles’ purple stuffed animal was never more than three feet away from him.
Later in the day, I was out driving with Miles sleeping in the backseat and Linnea home safe with her dad. I sat in the silence and realized why I was feeling tired and scattered and anxious. It’s because, of course, that’s just how parents feel. Being around small children is chaos.
You make a plan and it immediately goes out the window. You’re getting ready to go over to a friend’s house when your kid starts hacking up a lung and you realize you can’t go over there and expose other kids to whatever your kid has. You sit down to eat breakfast and you’re up
20 seconds later to grab milk, but not that milk, milk from the other carton that’s literally exactly the same. Then another 40 seconds go by and you’re up again because he didn’t want an apple, mom, he wanted PINEapple. You get in the car with the baby and immediately go back inside because something smells and it’s probably her diaper. You finally get your two-year-old to sit down and do a puzzle with you and less than a minute later he’s throwing the puzzle pieces at his sister’s head and yelling that he wants to go outside. So you wrangle him into the jacket, hat, gloves combo and play outside for three minutes until he says, ‘Cold! Inside! Inside!’
And through all this, your mind is so focused on the puzzle, the jacket, the hat, the milk, the apples, that you just FORGET all sorts of other stuff. The laundry never gets switched to the dryer. You never text back your friend. The oven is on and you have no idea why. Your husband asks you a question and you just don’t respond. It’s messy.
Before I had kids, my days were made up of large chunks. Maybe I would spend the whole day at work and the evening out to dinner with friends. Or on the weekend, maybe I would spend the morning on a hike and the afternoon lounging on the couch reading a book. But with kids, your days are made up of tiny little bite-sized chunks. One minute of this, three minutes of that, five minutes of the other thing, then back to this and that. For me, it’s the tiny chunks of time that make the days feel chaotic.
The thing is, there’s no getting around it. That’s just the way it is with little kids. Babies have to eat all the time and get put down for naps all the time and have their diapers changed all the time and if their parents don’t do that, bring in the authorities. Toddlers have minuscule attention spans and trying to force that to change will 1) not be fun for anyone, and 2) disrespect their inherent toddlerness. I mean that within reason- of course parents need to set boundaries and they can and should expect their toddlers to fit into THEIR worlds sometimes, but for the most part, parents gotta be patient.
So as the new year rolls in, my intention is to accept the chaos. Understand that kids create a whole different, messy, beautiful world, and if I don’t want to feel anxious and rattled 24/7, I need to make peace with the reality that my kids have the attention spans of goldfish.
So … any ideas on how to do that??