Controlled Chaos

You talk to any first time parents, and my guess is that they will tell you the same thing: parenting, in the beginning anyway, is at best controlled chaos. You are accustomed to a life in which you have a routine, you have a schedule, you know what has to be done and when.  But then you have a kid, and your everyday habits all totally disappear. When I found out my wife was pregnant, I thought about what it would entail.  Intellectually, I think I was prepared for the changes that come with becoming a father.  I was ready for the additions to my life that were about to come. I knew that I would have to make time in my day to drop my daughter off at daycare, to buy her clothes, shop for diapers, stay up with her at night; yep, I knew I would need to make time for some new things, and I was ready for it.  But I wasn’t ready for the way my normal habits would be irrevocably changed. The additional stuff, I could do, but to do all this new stuff and to have all the old stuff change as well, yeah, that caught me off guard.  I used to sit and write alot; nope, now there is a baby that needs a diaper. I used to work out quite a bit; nope, now there is a baby that will fuss if you put her down; I used to have a clean and organized apartment; nope, now there is a baby that doesn’t always like the vacuum.  I was ready for the new stuff, but I wasn’t ready for the ways in which all the old stuff would change as well.

What this means is that, as a new parent, you are perpetually busy. You’re working all day,  then coming home and taking care of the little one all afternoon and into the night.  This leaves very little time for the other stuff of life, like bills, cleaning, laundry, fixing the car, etc. You end up going a million miles an hour, doing ten things poorly at once, half-distracted the entire time, staring at the swirling chaos around you and wondering how you will make it through the week. And, if one thing falls out of place, you feel like the whole parental machine will come to a grinding halt.

More than one cog fell out of our parental machine this week. We went to a great wedding in NJ, and when we got home, we were greeted with a car with a completely dead battery. Great. And our daughter? She was fantastic on the trip. The whole weekend, she was relaxed, easy to fly with, and a big hit at all the get-togehers. But she was done. She wanted to nurse, and she wanted to nurse NOW! So we sat in the parking lot, trying to get a jump, in a cold car, with a baby that was screaming her head off.  When we did get a jump, we stopped in a parking lot and let her tank up, and eventually made it home like three hours later (its a 45 min drive).

The next morning, my wife got in the car to go to work, and, as she turned the key, the lights on the dashboard blinked on, then mockingly shut right off. The battery was still dead, even after the jump and the long drive home.  To top it off, the thermostat in our new condo had kicked the bucket as well, so we had no car, and no heat, and my wife’s job was requiring an extra handful of hours of work, just to add to the normal two jobs, school, and internship, all of which she navigates with breast-pump bag in hand at all times. My immune system likewise wanted in on the fun, and I a bad cough and runny nose were the theme of the week. Yes, the margin of error when you are a parent, the distance between controlled chaos and total chaos, is pretty slim. Change a few things, and the controlled chaos is simply chaos. The car, the thermostat, being sick, that counted as the “few things” that changed. I felt like I went through the whole week in a perpetual state of haze, looking at the next thing on the agenda, and having no idea how I was going to accomplish anything after that. (And to think, we only have one kid, both have a job, a car, are insured, a house….).

What does all this mean? Well, it means that if you don’t change your comfort level with chaos, you are going to go crazy.

I have always enjoyed racing as a form of dominance over chaos. Take the open water triathlon swim, for example. You and hundreds of other people  launch yourselves out from the shore, in the choppy, and, let’s be honest, dirty and amoeba-filled water, and emerge at the end of the full-contact melee in one piece. You then navigate racks of hundreds of bikes to find your own, even though they virtually all look the same, hop on and pedal for a good handful of miles, and return to the transition. You change out of your bike clothes, pray that no one stole your running shoes, put on the socks, tie the laces, and hit the road for a final run. When you are done, its like you conquered not only a particularly challenging athletic endeavor, you also managed to get your wetsuit, your goggles, your towel, your bike, your helmet, your tights, your running shoes, and about a million other things, to the same place, and get yourself in and out, and on and off, of them at the right time.  One little cog falls out of the machine, and the controlled chaos becomes simply chaos, and you can’t finish. The difference here, between the parenting and the racing, seems to be the level of control you have over the chaos. If you plan well, you can complete a triathlon, even an Ironman (so I hear), with relatively few problems. But when it comes to parenting, I have the feeling that trying to control too much will leave you disappointed every time. The car battery, the thermostat, getting sick, all things more or less out of our control. And the relative chaos that ensued? Also out of our control. So when I race, I will try to control everything I can. When I parent, I will simply enjoy the chaos.