The Bridges are Not Equally Spaced

Seasons of life

The concept of seasons of life is not new, or mine. It's on my mind recently based on the work of Sarah Young of Zing Collaborative and Erin Kiley Rogers's conversation on the Pivot Ball Change podcast. Looking through the Mama lens over the last few years, I've experienced almost as many life phases as actual nature seasons:  

• Pregnancy & Baby #1 in the Netherlands, where I worked for a couple years. I didn’t love the season of pregnancy. I don’t like daily vomiting, heartburn, or asking my husband to walk slower (to which one time he replied “I literally cannot walk any slower”).
• Navigating a move back to the US, designing a new job to fit my goals to stay career focused while having more flexibility and present time with my family. (Sarah at Zing Collaborative's coaching was instrumental in supporting this journey).
• Pregnancy & Baby #2 leave; my experience this second time around provided the framework for “Preparing for Your Family Leave”. 
• The season of Going Back to Work this second time, with a nanny share for our baby (and a neighbor's infant), and daycare for our toddler was a particularly tough one. I'll go into that more below. 
• A brief season of having 2 kids in the same daycare, followed by seasons of COVID: Spring #1, Summer #1, Fall #1, 8 month shift to full-time parent living in our RV. Our present season involves a lot of driving to a separate daycare and kindergarten. 

The bridges are not evenly spaced…or, "are we there yet"?

In my early 20s, I joined a group of friends to canoe on the Wisconsin River. It was meant to take a couple hours. The guide brought us to the drop-off point and told us we would go under 3 bridges, and then see the exit to paddle over and get out. Not many in our group were experienced paddlers, or particularly proud of our upper body strength, but it was a beautiful day and sounded fun...which it was for a while. Yet, after 2 hours, we had only gone under the first bridge! Collectively, we started panicking - would we be on this river for 6 hours?? Not yet parents, we lacked snack bags and gallons of water. We were thirsty! Hunger lurked! Suddenly, someone spied the 2nd bridge! And then, almost immediately was the 3rd. The guide had not told us that the bridges were evenly spaced - nor did we ask anything about their relative distance. Still, we had all put them into an evenly divided mind map. 

I had a similar experience for both my deliveries. For those who are not familiar with the vaginal birthing process, when the cervix has expanded to ~10 cm “dilation”, you can generally start actively pushing that baby out. Until then, contractions rock your body to widen the hole. At the beginning of labor, you might be anywhere from 0-”a few” cm dilated. The length of labor and rate of dilation is different for each woman, and each baby. For my first, I was actively contracting for only 5 hours before that I got the "ok to push" - that's fast, and ironically was a preview to my son's approach to most tasks. For my second baby, after several hours, I was “only” at 7cm and burst into tears at the thought of several more hours. But the centimeters are not evenly spaced in time.  

It's just a tough time

I tried really hard to appreciate the season of “a kid under 1”, even as I didn’t know how long it would last and often despaired in lack of sleep, fantasizing about reserving a hotel room for myself with young adult vampire fiction instead of a breastpump. I soaked in the 3am feeding (once it became JUST a 3am feeding instead of 11, 1, 3, and 5), marveling at my baby who seemed so big but still fit easily in my arms, willing my muddled brain to remember the soft cozy feel, the light from the street illuminating this quiet, shared baby moment. I wish I had allowed myself more pride and less stress at my body that was providing the feeding power. 

Looking back, having two working parents with a kid under 1 was a tough season. Then having two working parents with kids aged 3 and under 1 was a really tough season. It's why I put a section of "Topics to do Together" in my Preparing to Go Back to Work course; hopefully, some prompting questions, discussion, and practical tips from other parents can make things easier for your family. 

Before (kids) and After (kids)

Even though we were busy before kids - at work, with hobbies, family and social commitments - we chose our discretionary time based on what felt like the best priority for us. Simple. Independent. If I went out with friends, my husband got a pizza and played video games. If he had a work trip, I ordered Chinese and watched a Rom Com. 

These are some of the things that we've worked out as a family unit; our friends' routines look different from ours. And our happiest parent friends have worked out some guidelines as a family unit around this life stuff: 

• Before, I’ll do your laundry if it’s mixed in my basket. Or you can. Either way is fine. After, things like laundry aren't just yours and mine. This baby creates a high volume of tiny dirty clothes.
• Before, you cook most meals. You’re better at it, you enjoy it, and we can eat whenever the food is ready. We go to the grocery store together and I pick out the fruit while you select the vegetables. We walk and wander. After, we eat dinner at 5:30 as a family. Food must be rigorous planned, prepped in advance when possible, and ready before we melt down which occurs by 5:45. After dinner, you do the dishes while I get the kids ready for bed. After the kids are in bed, we collapse on the couch with a laptop, a remote, and cookies. 
• Before and after, we pay someone to help clean our house, a privilege for which I’m always grateful. 
• Before, we wake up when we want on the weekends, wander around a farmers market or decide where to brunch. After, we are woken at 6. The first year, I’ve been up many times throughout the night before 6. You take the kids to hang out and I sleep until 8. We go out for fresh air or an activity before 9 so that we can be back for afternoon nap. There are a few glorious months where we all nap on weekend afternoons. There are a few months where it seems that our kids trade off nap and waking time…so we’re just always awake. Or snatching stolen moments of sleep. 

I reveled in those first few weeks that each kid slept a full night, even as I wondered “why am I still so tired?”. Then one day I woke up and felt great, like my sleep had finally caught up. And now, my current season is “I choose nothing that is likely to interrupt my sleep”. 

And now, we adjust. Small and big tweaks here and there. Changes seem more subtle - instead of going from crawling to walking, our son goes from asking for an uncooked spaghetti noodle for breakfast to leaping onto the counter like Michael Phelps exiting the pool and gets it for himself. Instead of going from diapers to “the little potty”, our daughter asks us to turn on the fan and give her some privacy. She still asks Daddy to “do the second wipe”, one of my favorite things to hear as Mama…but someday soon, she just…won’t. 

We don’t all need the same things. We don’t even need the same things as ourselves in different seasons. Families and relationships are not 50/50 and the work is not evenly split in every season. I did 100% of the breastfeeding. My husband did 100% of the lawn mowing and 95% of the dishes. I’m getting better at reflecting on “what do I need right now” and we are working on talking with each other about what we want and need.

I hope that for you and your family, you are talking with each other and doing what works for you. 

The third bridge could be just around the bend, whether we ache for it to arrive or desperately want to paddle against the current of time. At least now, we have snacks.