Finding a New Rhythm in Motherhood, Part 2

Last time I told you I have this nice, longish list of goals I want to accomplish by (roughly) December 31, 2013. And most of those goals require a daily investment of my time. My full-time-work-at-home, new-mom time. Did you laugh at me? Snort in derision, maybe? It’s okay if you did. I forgive you.

I am aware that there are still only 24 hours in a day, in case you were wondering. I’m not delusional. God hasn’t shifted the universe to provide me with more hours in which to successfully accomplish everything. And yes, I do need sleep – as much as Baby Girl will allow me to get. I’m not planning to forego sleep – if anything, I hope to be getting more rest in 2013 than I did in the second half of 2012. Yes, I said hope. Hope is different from expect. I’m keepin’ it real. Baby Girl may not sleep through the night until she’s nine, for all I know.

What I’m talking about is re-ordering my days to find a new rhythm that works for me in this season. We all need rhythm. From the beginning, there has been rhythm to all of life. Rhythm was established with creation. There is rhythm to the rising and setting of sun and moon, to the seasons. There is rhythm to seven days of labor and a day of rest – sabbath. It makes sense that we, being God’s creations as much as earth and stars, would be creatures of rhythm. Even our bodies have rhythms and cycles of their own, independent of anything we might try to impress upon them.

Right now, my days can be incredibly full and chaotic. Balancing a full-time job, a marriage, a seven-month-old and a household while trying to meet my own spiritual, physical, emotional and intellectual needs is a crazy-making endeavor. But I’m working on it, and I’ve found some tools along the way that are helping me to find some semblance of rhythm, tools that enable me most days to feel, when I climb into bed at night, that it’s been a pretty good – if imperfect – day.

This 25 Point Manifesto for Sanity from my dear friend Ann was the first thing that helped me begin to wrap my arms around a new rhythm. So much of what she offers here is good and wise practice to delve into. I have the manifesto posted on my refrigerator, so I see it every time I walk by. It reminds me to slow down, to be deliberate, to celebrate in the midst of the busyness, and to be ever-mindful of God’s presence.

Here are a few of the key things I’m doing to help myself manage marriage, motherhood, my household, my job, and my own needs with some semblance of rhythm:

Begin each day with the Lord. I’ve resumed getting up early enough to begin my day in solitude. For a long time, my ability to spend daily, dedicated time in God’s Word with any kind of consistency was rare at best. Considering I’m exhausted by 10 p.m. every night, I knew I had to look at early morning as my new best friend if I was going to manage to have any quiet time with God’s word. Baby Girl gets up pretty early, and I needed to start beating her to it. After a good night, with maybe only one brief wake-up from Baby Girl to interrupt my rest, I roll out of bed at six. I make myself a cup of coffee, light a candle, and settle down at the kitchen table with my Bible and current devotional book, sipping my coffee while I read/pray in blissful silence and the sky begins to lighten. It is, I’m finding, a time worth getting up for, even when I feel like I could really use another half hour of sleep. I find myself drawing strength and encouragement from it, and I sure need that!

Make a daily plan. After my quiet time, I make my plan for the day. While my weekdays are mainly dictated by the demands of my full-time job, there are still gaps to fill in, the need to find time for the rest of life’s demands – laundry and dishes and errands and the things that are for me, like reading and writing and exercise. This Day’s Draft, also from thoughtful Ann, has become my right hand (note: you can find many other free daily planners and other helpful organizers online, including here). Granted, I rarely manage to check off every little thing, but it keeps me mindful of the priorities large and small, including simple, basic things like drinking enough water (something I seem to lose track of so easily).

Practice focused time and regular breaks. One of the most challenging things about being a new mom, for me, was the chaos. For the first three months, it seemed like I just couldn’t get a single thing done, whether it was folding a load of laundry, making a quick meal, or cleaning the bathroom, not to mention writing a blog post or taking a shower and blow-dying my hair! Whether you are a working mom or a stay-at-home mom, we all need focused time during which we power through the things we need to accomplish, but we also really need to remember to take regular breaks. Now that Baby Girl is a little bit older, I’ve found that the Pomodoro Technique works really well for me. In a nutshell, a “Pomodoro” is 25 minutes of very focused work time, followed by 5 minutes of break time. Every four Pomodoros, you take a longer break of 15-30 minutes. I use the Pomodoro Technique both during my workday (when it’s not dictated by meetings, that is) and during my household work time. Twenty-five minutes is the perfect amount of time to accomplish something of substance, from writing up a report to scrubbing the kitchen floor. During the work day, I use my five-minute breaks to connect regularly with Baby Girl, grab a cup of tea, read a blog post or a few pages of a book (that’s my book, eReader, manuscript and journal stack there in the photo above – I keep it all within grabbing distance), practice my scripture memorization, throw in a load of laundry or empty the dishwasher. Even if I choose to complete a five-minute chore during my break, it gives my mind a rest from what I was doing before, and I go back to work refreshed. During non-working hours, I use Pomodoros to do cleaning, fold laundry, make my meal plan, and so on. Knowing I have just 25 minutes before the timer on my phone goes off motivates me to work quickly and efficiently, because I’m looking forward to five minutes of respite.

Plan meals. I’ve found that making a weekly dinner menu has a significant impact on my daily rhythm because I never find myself in a tizzy at 5 p.m., trying to figure out what we’re having for dinner. Every Friday night (which is takeout night), I choose 4-5 meals to make the next week, including planning which night(s) I expect there to be leftovers. I try to have at least one night of leftovers plus one night of planned takeout to give myself breaks, even though I love cooking. Then, I make my grocery list accordingly. While it takes time to choose meals (I always consider what’s already in the fridge and pantry) and figure out what I need to buy, it saves time and headache in the long run. My sister-in-law never used to plan dinners a week at a time – instead, she would decide during the day what to cook that night, and would stop at the grocery store on her way home from work. She would make another trip on Saturday to buy other things she needed, like cereal and paper towels. We estimated that she was spending at least four hours a week in the grocery store! I probably spend an hour planning and an hour shopping. There are lots of great free printable menu planners available online (again, there are some great free printables here), but I like this notepad version. Each one is sixty sheets and lasts about 14 months. I like that there’s space on the right for breakfast items, lunch items, and snacks. This helps E, for example, by indicating that there are bagels in the refrigerator, which he might not see (and eat) otherwise. As things run out during the week, I cross them off.

Divide household chores into manageable parts. I’ll just say it: I hate cleaning. Despise it. Abhor it. When I was growing up, my mom cleaned the entire house from top to bottom every Saturday. Kudos to her, but let me tell you, cleaning house is not how I want to spend my Saturdays, especially because I’m on Baby Girl duty all day while E does the bulk of his homework for the following week and I need to get the grocery shopping and other errands done. So I use a cleaning calendar customized to fit my home’s needs (it’s there below in the picture, on the fridge along with my menu pad, the Sanity Manifesto, and two of my online book club reading schedules). Every night after work and on Saturday mornings, I spend 25 minutes (one Pomodoro) blazing through one room or one major task throughout the whole house, like vacuuming. I like it because it divides the work into chunks that are quickly accomplished, and it feels like things never really have a chance to get dirty. I also throw in a load of laundry almost every morning, drying and folding it during my five-minute break times. This way, the laundry never reaches a point that feels unmanageable, and I have time for other things, like my husband.

Plan daily quality time with your spouse. I’ve never been much of a TV person, but E and I have gotten into the habit of watching old TV series on Netflix or iTunes. It’s cheap, it’s relaxing, and we enjoy plenty of banter along with it. We choose a series at a time, and one show will generally last us a few months, depending how many episodes aired. Sometimes we even wait for something to finish its current season so we can watch it at our convenience. We’ve done this with Battlestar Galactica, The Tudors, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, and most recently Lost. I’m not necessarily suggesting you go the TV route, but find something that suits you both, some way you can connect daily. Take a walk after dinner. Play a game you both like. Share a bowl of ice cream on the couch after the kids are in bed. Find some way – any way – to connect before your head hits the pillow for the night.

Make exercise a priority. When I was single, I worked out after work or late in the evening. But back then, there was no one waiting for me to make dinner, no baby to bathe, no laundry pile screaming my name. After Baby Girl was born and I went back to work, I knew I had to find a new exercise routine that fit in with my new life. It was a struggle. Most moms say that if they don’t work out first thing in the morning, it doesn’t happen. But folks, I am so not  that person who can roll out of bed and go for a three-mile jog. I’ve tried. I’m incredibly sluggish upon rising, and while I might feel good afterward, working out before eight never feels successful to me. It takes me a few hours to feel awake and energized enough to move my bod that vigorously. My solution? I start work an hour early at 7 a.m., work until mid-morning (depending on my meeting schedule), then head to the gym or out for a run. If you’re having trouble fitting in exercise the way you used to pre-kids, start noodling some other options. Find a gym with child care. Buy a jogging stroller. Sign up for a Saturday yoga class. Coerce your spouse into letting you off the hook after dinner two nights a week so you can take a few loops around the block. Buy some workout DVDs and get down in your living room during naptime. Just make it happen.

Carve out time for your passions. With everything else I have to do, my writing is always the thing that’s in danger. So I’ve tried to commit to one of two potential blocks of writing time every day – either during my lunch hour, or as soon as Baby Girl is in bed. If Baby Girl is napping at lunch time, I grab my yogurt or hummus and settle in at the kitchen table for an hour of uninterrupted writing. If she’s awake at noon, I wait until she goes to bed and then spend an hour on a blog post or my novel before E and I have our TV time. I keep a journal in which I plan out blog posts for both blogs, so that I’m always prepared to jump in and start writing (I do that planning on Sunday afternoons), and I always have a printout of the latest version of my novel handy for making notes and edits easy. I wish I had more time, of course, but an hour a day is better than nothing. Some days, unfortunately, I end up having to forego it altogether because something unexpected happens – Baby Girl is teething and fussy, dinner takes twice as long as planned, someone calls and wants to talk. It’s not always possible to manage all 24 hours of the day. The important thing is to plan time for your passions, so that you manage to make that time happen as often as possible. If you never plan for it, it won’t happen at all.

Practice Sabbath. I deliberately abstain from chores, errands, laundry and other household-related work on Sundays (this is why I plan my menu on Friday, do my grocery shopping on Saturday, and use a six-day cleaning calendar). I cook something simple and nourishing for dinner, most often a big pot of soup and some homemade bread, and reserve the rest of the day for church, time with E and Baby Girl, reading, writing, occasionally crafting, and just generally relaxing. I try to remember that the Lord himself rested from his labors on the seventh day of creation, and he asks us to do the same, which is certainly in our best interest. Because I practice Sabbath, I’m always ready to hit the ground running on Monday (if Baby Girl lets me sleep on Sunday night, that is).

Whatever stage of motherhood you might be in, I’m sure you’re still trying to balance all the pieces of life with a family. Word is that it changes continually as your kids grow, and you have to readjust. Personally, I’m looking forward to the day when Baby Girl sleeps through the night – every night – and the extra energy I’ll have when that happens.

If you’re a mom, I’d be interested in knowing what’s helped you to have rhythm in your days. Leave a comment below!

Blessings,