Happy January, everyone. We’re four weeks into the new year, and like many people, I’ve already given up on my resolution. I told myself that as soon as the calendar turned to 2024, I was going to stick to a strict bedtime routine for my 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter. I didn’t even do it for one night. I didn’t even get so far as thinking about what the routine would be. Bath? Books? Who knows!
So now, I’m shifting my new year mindset. Instead of a specific resolution that’s destined to fail, I’m going to take the opportunity that is January’s clean slate to tidy up something that’s been feeling messy in my mom-brain. I want to learn to accept the chaos that is motherhood.
Last week, I was talking to a friend about my son and daughter giving me a sense or order in a chaotic world. She laughed at me, but I stand by the idea: There’s something comforting and safe about the fact that whatever your toddler or preschooler is doing that’s driving you crazy, thousands of other toddlers and preschoolers are doing the exact same thing at the exact same age.
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, something that’s true of all young children. (At least that’s what I tell myself).
This past Saturday, 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 toddler Twister and making waffles they won’t eat and making sure my daughter’s Elsa doll was never more than three feet away from her. Later in the day, I was out driving with my son in the backseat and my daughter 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. Small children are chaotic.
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 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 from that carton; she wants milk from the red carton, not the blue one. Then another 40 seconds go by and you’re up again because he didn’t want an apple, mom, he wanted a pineapple, then he’s yelling because you don’t have a pineapple.
You get in the car with the two year old and immediately go back inside because something smells and it’s probably her diaper. You finally get your big kid to sit down and do a puzzle and less than a minute later he’s throwing the 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, “It’s too cold, let’s go watch the Mario movie, and can you take me to the place with the hot chocolate and the cake pops?”
And through all of 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 respond to your friend’s text. The oven is on and you have no idea why. Your husband asks you a question and while you’re thinking of your answer, you forget what the question was. 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 and preschoolers 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 little kids to fit into THEIR worlds sometimes, but for the most part, parents gotta be patient.
As the new year rolls on, 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 are loud and they have the attention spans of goldfish.
So … any ideas on how to do that??