Time Change

How and where does the time go? In one of the free parenting magazines I receive I read a line recently that I can half identify with. "As a parent, the days go by slowly but the years go by quickly." In my world, the days go quickly as well. Noah has happily found his own routine without us pushing one on him, and if I pay attention and stick to it, then a typical day looks like this:

1. Wake up. If we're all lucky.
2. Noah fills his diaper in a massive way like clockwork between 6:30 and 7 a.m. This requires a complete change of outfit.
3. Go downstairs for breakfast. Noah sucks on organic Cheerios while I make myself something and warm up some real food for him.
4. Go upstairs and give Noah a bath and get him dressed.
5. Play for a little bit until Noah wants to have milk and lie down.
6. Noah naps. I shower and get dressed, and if Noah continues to sleep than I go online and check e-mail or write or clean the house or pay bills or do any number of other pleasurable possibilities.
7. We play for a while together, or he plays with his toys and I continue above mentioned possibilities nearby. As long as he doesn't try to eat the dirt out of the plants, he is usually fine on the living room floor on his quilt with all his toys.
8. We have lunch. Noah now loves yogurt, like his Dad. Matthew panics if we only have one tub of Stonyfield Banilla left in the refrigerator.
9. We play for a while, often upstairs since he has another play area on the floor of our bedroom.
10. Noah naps again. If I have energy, I do a little work for my job, or I do paperwork, or phone a friend. If my energy is flagging, I watch television and let my brain rest.
11. Matthew comes home from work and we make dinner.
12. The bedtime routine: We get Noah's pjs on, Daddy reads him books, and then Noah goes down with me at 7 p.m.
13. The day usually ends for all intents and purposes there. It's rare that I have energy left for much else after Noah goes to sleep. We'll read or watch a little television but if we are up still at 8:30 it's unusual.

With only slight deviations if Noah gets up early or sleeps in, or if it is a weekend and Matthew is home all day, that is what my time looks like. On days that we run errands, or the two days a week that I go to work with Noah, I plug in said errands or time in the office between steps 6 and 11.

So 9 months' worth of days have slid by, and my being has become so attuned to this routine that I often don't look at the clock all day. I no longer wear a watch (the last time I wore one was when I was in labor), and when I do check the time it seems like it is always bedtime. I cannot believe the number of times the clock has read 6:00 p.m. when I glance at it - time to wind down for the night.

This is not how I used to approach time. The current culture, my job, and I'll admit my natural tendencies too, have made me a multitasker. While I of course still do some things at once (do the laundry while playing with Noah, make a phone call while walking him in the stroller around the 1st floor of our house), I no longer approach every 15-minute segment of time as if it is a meaningful unit in which I can accomplish 3 errands or 10 e-mails or other larger projects. My oldest sister who is also a mother said on the phone recently that it was hard for her to contemplate going out to run even a quick errand when my niece was a baby because of everything that had to happen for that to be accomplished (for us today: get dressed for the outdoors, get Noah dressed for the outdoors, stock the diaper bag and add car toys and another couple toys for my pocket, pack water and a snack for both of us, find my glasses, lock the house, turn the heat down, check the stove to make sure it's off so I don't burn the house down (a nod to my mother)...). It's not bad, but it's light years away from when I would shower, grab my list, and go knock off 15 errands in three hours.

Was my quality of life worse then? Certainly Noah adds a dimension to my experience that is wonderfully unlike anything I've ever known, but things were also pretty great before he came into my life. I prided myself on how much I could get done. Another thing I have read in many of the magazines is that once you become a parent, you should never expect to get anything done again. Don't expect to take a shower before 4 p.m., to do anything on that TO DO list that is on the fridge, etc. I really hated reading this, largely because it makes it sound like active parenting isn't doing anything or should be seen in competition with other more meaning things I might be doing, but thankfully it is really only sort of true even in the best way they might mean it - don't expect to be able to do things for yourself.

I have been able to shower every morning since Noah was born, which is good because that's how I wake up to full consciousness. I grew up in a house without running water, so after 20+ years now of living with plumbing I still appreciate a hot shower a lot. While it's true that I am not accomplishing things quickly on the schedule or personal lists that I had before he was born, I can see (most days) that the point is that the list has changed. When Matthew and I decided to have a baby, Noah became the top thing we were doing. And from Noah's perspective, when I can tune in to it, it's amazing how much we do every day - the multiple costume changes, playing with rubber ducks in the kitchen sink and soaking everything, reading stacks of books, discovering sparkly Mardi Gras beads, rolling balls, crawling around, dumping out every container with balls or dominoes or anything within reach, nursing, napping... It's a lot, every day, all the time for him. It's his new life.

So do I miss being Little Miss Do-It-All? Only sometimes, and interestingly, it never takes a day or even an hour of multitasking at my old speed to right the balance. It takes doing one small thing that I feel is important, and noticing that it is done and I did it. That's it. This is one of the gifts that Noah has given me, one way in which being a parent is covering over an old open manhole in my heart. One feeling I was often plagued with in the Time Before Noah and do not experience nearly as often today is this - that feeling that it's never enough, never enough, no matter how I work to make every minute productive and helpful to others, it's never enough. One of the rewards of being Noah's mother is that he tells me every day what enough really is - for him, for others, and for me. And I no longer wish for more hours in the day to get more than that done.