One thing’s for sure: who knows

It feels as though a few things I value a lot – time blocking, time management, organization, a schedule – have been thrown in a blender without the lid on. My scramble to scrape my favorite, now-mauled ritual off the proverbial ceiling and paste it back into routine has proven to be futile.

I’ve found myself waiting – patiently, as one does when whimsically pining for someone or something that never shows up – for a bygone era – the era of knowing when sleep would happen, the time I’d wake up, the hour I’d work out, the ones I’d eat and shower.

Today I realized that era isn’t returning. And it shouldn’t. It’s gone and this new one is here. If I keep waiting for the ghost of a past life to suddenly morph into my present-day reality, I will be waiting a long time. Too long. Eighteen years long. Lifetime long.

I’d shill out my moments wondering: is this the night she begins sleeping through them all? Is this the day she begins taking predictable naps at predictable times? Is this the day I stop competitively measuring my productivity by the number of ounces of breastmilk I’ve expressed from my body?

I can’t nickle and dime my way through these years. I won’t. So what is the alternative?

I stop wondering. I stop trying to grasp the tattered remains of an orderly, previous life, and I use my moments to build a new, transitional one. I settle the score with predictability, or rather the lack of it, and I let it win. Each day becomes its own reality, different from yesterday’s and probably nothing like tomorrow’s.

I embrace moments like this one – typing this with my thumb in an iPhone note, holding my device with one hand, the charging port leaving an indentation on my pinkie finger, my entire hand falling numb. All because in my other arm and hand is my sleeping infant daughter. This is not a moment I would trade for all the ones in my former life when I had the luxury of writing words at will with two thumbs or ten fingers.

My new predictable moments are here. The way she smiles at me in the morning. The way she snorts when she’s hungry. The way she wants morning snuggles, then food, more snuggles, THEN playtime (and please, maintain that order.)

Do you see what I mean? A changed way of life isn’t always for the worst. It’s a shift, a difference, unfamiliar, wobbly at first, but tucked within the uncertainties comes a new way, a learned confidence, and the greatest knowing of love.