Life is a complete scramble right now. It’s not just the mad rush to cram lunch in my kids’ faces and pack Colum a snack and get everybody out the door in time to catch the school bus every single day. It’s not just the trying to get a six year old out of a wet bathing suit with a screaming baby and a three year old running laps around the change room. It’s not just juggling t-ball practices and games and two different swimming lessons with dinner prep and dirty diapers. It’s not just getting them dressed and undressed and bathed and maybe even squeezing in time for a shower myself.
That’s just my baseline scramble. That stuff is expected.
It’s also the laundry and the dishes and the toys and the games and the snippets of paper and all the freaking STUFF that I can’t keep at bay. It’s the papers from school piling up on the kitchen counter and the dry erase calendar that’s been scribbled over. It’s the doctor’s appointments and birthday parties to attend and to throw and the countless other events and obligations I can no longer keep in my head. It’s the pantry jammed full of food stuff in no particular order despite my best intentions to keep it organized. Ditto for the fridge. And the linen closet. And all the closets and drawers, really. It’s the cleaning and weeding and planting and mulching and all kinds of other gardening-type stuff I’m still learning about.
It’s also this blog and the other writing I should be doing. In any given moment I have SO MUCH to do that I am paralyzed with indecision. If Mary’s napping for an hour what can I really get accomplished? A blog post? Maybe, if it’s crappy, and if I don’t also check in with Twitter and Facebook and G+ and Pinterest and my email and my other email. I’ll start to unload the dishwasher and then put some clothes in the dryer and then get Irene a snack and then start to pick up the toys in the living room and then quickly check my email … and somehow nothing gets done.
And that is the hardest part of parenting for me. The doing nothing. We go to the park and they play and maybe I play too or chat with another parent and, really, I’m doing nothing. It’s just so much waiting around. Waiting for swimming and t-ball and the school bus. Waiting for bedtime.
I know, intellectually, that’s it’s not doing nothing. I know that in those gaps, those moments of waiting and doing nothing, the best parts of parenting happen. Just being there, watching the t-ball game. Reading to Irene and Mary while we wait. Playing ball with the kids. Walking places! We do our best talking when we’re walking and driving places. It’s just so hard to be in that moment when I’m constantly rifling through a never-ending To Do list in my head. It feels like I’m doing nothing and I don’t have time for nothing!
I also know that this is magnified tenfold by the baby. So much of our at-home time is spent caring for an increasingly mobile and demanding baby. The half hour here, the twenty minutes there that I used to spend cleaning the kitchen, prepping dinner, folding laundry or even reading a magazine are no longer sufficient. Or, rather, I just don’t get those twenty or thirty uninterrupted minutes anymore. So what could be, should be and used to be a twenty minute job now takes an hour if it gets done at all. And then the sheer volume of chores and tasks and work to be done during naps and at night is just too much.
But babies grow up. In the blink of an eye Mary will be walking and talking and I will miss this babyhood. So this too shall pass and I shouldn’t wish it away before its time.
In the meantime, I need discipline and schedules and routines that work. I need organization. Please help a girl out. What are your best tips for organizing your time?
11 replies on “On Not Keeping Up At All Oh God Please Help”
I don’t really have any advice to share, sadly. I want to thank you though, for reminding me that the age-gap between my kids is great! 4 whole years between each of ’em, and the advent of full-day kindergarten (which our in-district school has) means that I’ll have a little more time between all the madness… at least I hope!
Also: I would say the best advice here is to manage your expectations. Okay, what I really mean is keep your expectations *low* lol… Today I got 1 load of laundry done as well as emptied & loaded the dishwasher, and baked with the boy. That’s a banner day for us! We’ve been to the library, and we’re going to the dentist. I don’t expect much from me… and that helps. Is that at all possible for you?
Yes, super-low expectations got my nicely through the first six months, but there’s more on my plate now. But I do think naming exactly what I hope to accomplish in a given day and keeping my expectations realistic will be a huge help. Thanks!
Three things:
1. It will get better once the baby becomes more independent but you already know this from the other two kids.
2. Let stuff go. Decide what won’t drive you crazy if it doesn’t get done. For me, that happens to be washing my floors. Dirt is good for kids right?
3. MULTI-TASK. Check your email while watching T-ball. Skip baths and just have everybody (including you) pile in the shower. I’m always thinking of ways to optimize my time. Get creative. That way I don’t feel like I’m doing “nothing”. I totally understand your feelings on this one.
Last time we were at the pool I found myself wondering how much it would cost to install one of those multi-person showers in my house! Multi-tasking is key, for sure. Thanks.
I got nothing much to offer other than commiseration. One thing that’s keeping my head above water right now is copious use of the calendar on my phone to record everything – like playdates, sports, social events, shopping lists, blog posts to be written, etc. Right now it’s telling me I should be on the computer banking. I’m pressing snooze. :)
There is a plaque that hangs at my front door: Our house is clean enough to be healthy and messy enough to be happy.
I am a single work-out-of-the-home mum to an only child, but for me the key has been owning less. It means less to clean, less to pick up, less to put away. Well, except for underwear, so that we can go two weeks w/o having to do laundry. Of course, it helps that I don’t have laundry at home, so I need to hit the laundromat and do all the loads at once
Hey Rebecca, I feel your pain. Not a real solution-finder myself, but a good survivor, said with the modesty I can muster. What I did when there were a few too many on my plate, well, I simply opted to leave some out. Just to make time to breathe. Since it is mostly me and my boys, juggling everything and making sure nothing fell had a negative impact on my relationship with my boys. I did not like/want that. So my solution was: if it’s not vital, drop it. For now. I hope that helps. Seems like a radical solution, but it works for me. This too shall pass :-)
Hi Rebecca
Thanks for your wonderful blog post. It reminded me of what my life was like only a few short years ago. I can’t say that I miss the chaos of it all (mine are 10 and 7 now, so much more independent).
I think the most important thing I learned was to just let some things go (like dusting and floor mopping. Ugh!) and learn to say ‘no.’ Oh, and I also got a Mommy calendar where I could write down EVERYTHING – and keep it high out of the reach of the kids. I would be lost without it, honestly.
Take a deep breath. It gets easier (until they reach puberty!).
Rebecca, I am exhausted just reading it. I can’t imagine living it. That is why I chose not to be it. It’s the most under rated job in the world. Easily the most important for a mother makes the future.Something our friends to the south are having trouble remembering.
You are never doing nothing. A child never forgets that he/she can see Mommy on the sidelines. A child never forgets that he/she doesn’t see Mommy on the sidelines. Both acts leave a permanent mark on a future adult.
Thank you for this post. It reminds us of just how hard the job is. Just how important the job is. And just how lucky your kids are! Happy Mother’s Day.
[…] the never-ending whining and bickering and nagging, hidden among the chaos and the stress and the time spent doing nothing, there’s […]
Hi Rebecca,
This is hands down my favourite parenting blog post EVER because it perfectly captures the head-spinning time that being in the parenting trenches with little kids has become for me in the past year. Thank you — I no longer feel so alone and I got to laugh about it while reading your excellent run down of what i see now is a common situation, at least in this little part of the world (I am a Junctionite as well!)…
As for organizing tips, my partner and I have committed to writing things on a family calendar hung in our kitchen THE MOMENT we decide to RSVP, attend, commit to some event or chunk of time in a day. This is the only way I can keep straight what comes next because right now I only have the brain capacity for right now. Just remember to check the calendar everyday… Of course, you could go digital with this and have a Google calendar you and your partner both post to… A calendar has helped me feel so much more organized and on top of stuff…
We bought the house we now live in a week before our second child was born and it already had second floor laundry in place (and properly done with a drain underneath the washer, I might add)… It has been a life saver in terms of time and energy savings especially since we cloth diaper and the kids seem to go through three outfits a day… Second floor laundry means clothes get clean (and sometimes folded) instead of neglected and something to curse as you head for the basement at 10 pm…
Not so much an organizing tip as a time saving time — we’ve recently scaled bathing the kids to every other day or every two days, unless they are really gross from playing outside or meal time. We realized their skin really can’t handle daily baths or showers (my kids are three and 10 months) AND neither can our sanity during bedtime, so less baths has been so much easier on us. And really, unless your child stinks, who really knows when you bathed them last?
I could go on, but will end with this. I recently attended the Motherhood and History conference put on by the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) (more here: http://www.motherhoodinitiative.org/) I had my youngest with me, of course — nursing, bouncing, rocking while attending conference sessions, networking — exhausting but worth it… One presenter is a professional activist for a Welfare Mother Warriors group in the States… She was selling t-shirts that read “Motherwork is work.” And since then whenever I have a moment of doubt, wondering what I am doing while one child swims and the other sleeps on me as I make some phone calls to follow up about this appointment or that question, I remind myself, this is not a vacation, this is not you being lazy or unproductive, “motherwork is work!” And mostly, I feel vindicated and worthwhile and productive. Also, attending Toronto Feminist Mom’s group meetings (check Facebook!) at the end of each month have also been a way to keep the head spinning at bay for a few hours and remember I have a brain, some opinions and there are some great women doing excellent motherwork just outside my front door…