Worry, worry everywhere

Before I had kids, I worried.  But not much.  My philosophy was that worry doesn't solve anything, it only makes things worse.  It is what it is.  Let's deal with the reality of the situation before us as opposed to creating scenarios that exacerbate unnecessary angst.  I had boiled life down to mathematics.  All problems were solvable as long as you understood your variables as well as understanding what level of control existed.  Because logic was in the driver's seat, emotion could be held in abeyance or rationalized away.  iLarge or small, this was my approach to everthing.

Then I had kids.  And I was almost immediately immobilized by the foreign and dampening feeling of perpetual worry.  Is the baby getting enough milk?  What is that noise that she just made? What color is her poop?  Why didn't she poop today?  Why did she poop 5 times today?  Why is she working so hard at trying to poop?  Why isn't she mimicking me?  Why isn't she rolling over/sitting, standing or pulling up/walking/babbling/pointing/waving/talking yet?  Then of course it's worry that they are going to get hurt - physically, emotionally, socially.  And I was reminded by my parents that the worry never, ever goes away.  Yay!  Something to look forward to - a lifetime of ceaseless concern and toil!

So, how to manage this new and terrifying, unending emotion?  I had to convince myself to get back to basics.  Back to the sheer mathematics of life and apply that to dealing with these three little kids that I love so much.  It is hard.  But, thankfully my husband helps me sort out the facts so that we can begin to identify resources to solve the problem.  But some things are easier than others to manage. 

But the concession I have to make is that it is immeasurably harder to maintain such a forensic view of the world when it is your child (biological or bonus) - because your objectivity is so clouded by this fierce need to protect.  (who knew???)  So nagging worry persists - but I'm no longer immobilized.

**NEWSFLASH** Mommy's Worldwide Unite - 4 Extra Hours added to the day

If only!  I need AT LEAST an extra 4 hours a day to, in no particular order:

• Clean my floors and scrub my bathrooms (should I really have gotten a house with 5?)
• Assemble healthy meals for the brood
• Work out and work off 2 years of pregnancies and shrink my bloated rear, thighs and tummy
• Read - current events, a novel, a newspaper, the biz journal - something other than Goodnight Moon
• Send birthday cards so that they actually arrive on time
• I know there's more, but I'm forgetting what it all is - a phenomenon largely known as "mommy brain"

Before I had kids, I seemed to have a fount of time.  And it was all my own.  Saturdays.  By 10:00am I had beds stripped, laundry done, bathrooms cleaned (albeit far fewer) and floors vacuumed.  These days, by 10:00, I'm lucky to be out of my PJs and have gotten 2 loads of laundry into the laundry room.  I used to be able to make it to the gym for an hour and a half, go to work, cook a meal, watch some tv or read a book and get to bed at a reasonable hour.  That all seems like some mythical dream now. On an exceptionally good day my schedule looks like:

1. 5:45 am - up and out of bed (M-F)
2. 6:15 am - dressed, make up on and heading downstairs
3. 6:30 am - juice consumed, breakfast laid out for baby #1 & let the pumping begin
4. 7:00 am - help husband finish dressing both babies - this may or may not include changing them out of the digs he'd chosen
5. 7:15 am - baby #1 eats breakfast and baby #2 gets nursed while watching Nick, Jr
6. 7:30 am - Husband has prepacked the car with bags - I bring kiddos to the car with my coffee
7. 7:45 am - On my way to day care, singing, chatting and encouraging baby #1 not to take her arms out of the arm straps on her car seat or throw things at baby #2
8. 8:15 am - Arrive at day care - provide updates on schedules and issues
9. 8:20 am - On my way to work - listening to NPR 
10. 8:45 am - Arrive at work
11. 5:00 pm - Leave work and pick up kiddos
12. 5:30 pm - Pick up babies - get update on schedules and issues
13. 6:00 pm - Arrive at home - unload the car - 2 trip minimum
14. 6:15 pm - Get baby #1 situated playing and/or watching Dora - then unpack diaper bags and ideally clean bottles
15. Get dinner on the stove (low)
16. 6:30 pm - Nurse baby #2
17. 6:45 pm - Place baby #2 in bouncy seat or bumbo chair, make sure baby #1 has not gotten into anything she shouldn't have and proceed to completing dinner; maybe review 5th grader's homework
18. 7:15 pm - Serve dinner - pray both kids are in a good mood
19. 7:30 pm - Clear dinner plates - on a good, good night - clean kitchen
20. 8:00 pm - Upstairs for bath time
21. 8:30 pm - Baby wrangle and reading/nursing time with babies and hubby - pray kids are willing to go down
22. 9:00 pm - Babies down - time for Mama's shower
23. 9:30 pm - Time for Mommy & Daddy to chat - or more likely watch some TV - where one or both of them will fall asleep on the couch

So, since I was a modestly successful business person, why is managing a family of five so flipping difficult?  Have all of my time management skills completely abandoned me?  Am I no longer able to juggle, prioritize and execute?  When I had the kids, did part of my brain vacate my body along with each small infant?  And, hell, why do some people make it look so easy?  Am I deficient in some way - lacking some motivation that I once seemed to have in spades?

While I wish I had the ability to slow the Earth's rotation, I will have to figure out how to squeeze more into my day.  Step One - get up earlier.  Maybe 5:00 - pump, then gym, then shower, then the rest?  I know when I'm not nursing, it will all get a little easier, but I don't want to wish away this time either.  Until then, I will continue to try to tweak schedules and secretly entreat some exceptionally bright scientists to figure out how to manufacture more time.

Transition

At my age, which is not inconsiderable, I can look back over the course of my life and see it divided into 4 distinct sections:

• Childhood - a time of carefree existence when the most pressing issue was that it was raining outside and playing would have to be done inside.  In retrospect, this was such a short and fleeting time!  It is replete with tender and fun memories though.  Kick the can, flashlight tag, riding bikes until dark, snow forts, note passing. Tiger Beat magazine and crushes that lasted 2.2 seconds.
• Teendom - a time of unadulterated angst masked by adolescent bravado that made my parents want to abandon me in a cave.  The thinking was dominated by being popular, wearing Izod (before it was Lacoste), Polo, Jordache and life was marked with everything being a melodrama.  I knew way more than my parents did - I mean they were so totally out of touch.  Einstein's theory of relativity was never so apparent as when I look back on this time.  If felt soooooo long, but was really a blink of an eye.  (Thank God - or my parents would have truly lost their minds and/or fed me to hungry bears!)

• Adulthood - the longest period in my life.  A time when I learned how to pay my bills, succeed at work, develop real and lasting relationships - particularly with my parents - who weren't idiots after all.  In fact, it was during this period that I realized that it was ME that was the idiot.  Whoa!  My adulthood phase lasted just shy of 20 years.  I really got to know who I was, tried to cure or at least educate the idiot within, determined what I liked and what I didn't through a series of trials and readjustments.  By the end of this period, I felt that I knew how to conquer the universe.  As my dad told me repeatedly (having been a veteran of the one period I had not yet entered), I had the theory down.  But practicum, I hadn't touched it yet - not really. 

• Parenthood - BAM!  Ok, so I was still an idiot.  During the 20 year adulthood phase, I not only got to know me - I also spoiled me.  I had no clue what it was like to get up and have other people's needs supersede my own.  But I sure did find out that my inner super type A personality would be going into hyperdrive over the well being of these small helpless beings that I loved more that I had loved anything else - EVER.  My world was irrevocably turned on its ear, putting me for the first time ever in a position of never-ending uncertainty.

I decided to write this blog in order to chronicle this new experience - the highs, the lows, the discoveries and the brick walls.  It will be as much a journal as well as comic (if not karmic) opportunity for my parents to chuckle as I stumble along acquiring the real lessons of the theories I'd thought I'd mastered.