As a person who thrives on deadlines — who makes quick decisions when the stakes are high, who has structured her entire career around working under the wire — I’ve gotten a lot worse about keeping my own since I had a baby.
I realized this when quarantine self-improvement projects became the fashion.
I, too, was spending almost all of my time at home, staring at the things I owned and wondering why they weren’t better. But I wasn’t baking bread. My closets weren’t getting Kondo-ed. Simple chores remained beyond my grasp.
Yet it seemed like I had nothing but time. The hours wile away as I watch a baby wake up to the world. While she is exploring — what noise do these two things make when I smash them together? Shall I sing a little song with all the consonants I know? Can I crawl inside of the dishwasher? — there is always an adult hovering nearby.
This is how it should be. But it’s funny to think about from a distance. As a parent, when she’s playing, my role is supervisory. My job is to stay vigilant lest she scoot off a ledge, constantly attuned to the need to pluck something out of her mouth. (As my dad and fellow baby-watcher says, it will be a miracle if we make it through fall without her eating an acorn.)
Much has been lamented about the expectation of productivity during a pandemic. The journalist (and fellow Substacker) Anne Helen Petersen has written a lot about this. These days, we’re all performing our routine tasks under duress. The cult of constant self-improvement is at odds with our systems so routinely flooded with anxiety.
With the election less than two weeks away, it has become ever more important for me to operate with grace.
For myself, this means redefining my metrics for success. I recently read that breastfeeding a baby for a year is equivalent in hours to a full-time job. In two months, I’ll have accomplished both.
And so I’ve been setting deadlines that formerly might have seemed hilarious.
How long do I have to donate these baby clothes? One week to put them in a bag, one week to put the bag in the car, a third week to drop them off.
How much time can I commit to volunteering for progressive causes? One hour a month. (And if I have to give money instead of my time this year, so be it.)
When should we tear out the rest of our rotting deck? By December sounds reasonable.
This Saturday, I woke up at my new normal of 6 a.m., when Julia starts cooing in her crib, happily for awhile, and then more insistently as she tries out a sound that calls to me over the monitor: “mmmmmMA. MA. MA.”
By 8, we were dressed and downtown for errands. The fog was still on the spires of St. John’s cathedral. I got a coffee at Café Mirabelle across the street. The smoke alarm went off in their kitchen and the firetrucks came screaming up the square while we sat at a table outside, to her delight.
By 9 a.m., she was down for her first nap, when in a former life I would have just getting up. It was amazing how much I had accomplished already.