You Can’t Optimize Motherhood
Two of the great gifts of having nearly eight years between babies are perspective and time.
I never imagined we’d be an only child family for so long, nor that we’d be foster parents with a sweet little baby in our care for an undetermined amount of time.
As I once again navigate the world of no sleep, feeding, rocking all night, folding tiny baby clothes and changing so many diapers, I am exhausted. Like most of you, I would give anything for a full night of sleep and a day to myself to do nothing at all.
What I’m also navigating during this time is the onslaught of information, courses, advice and products that follow you everywhere when you’re in the baby world again. Yes, advertising and social media existed when my older daughter was born, but it really was nothing like the world we live in now. At nearly all moments of my life, I’m inundated with social media ads, emails, push notifications from retailers and endless advice from other parents.
I found myself feeling dizzy from the amount of information swirling around me when we first brought baby girl home. Not only does she have typical baby needs, but she also has some special needs and everything else with the courts and caseworkers that goes along with foster care. I could not handle it all.
Until I realized that I didn’t have to because we can’t optimize motherhood. Let me write that out again. WE CANNOT OPTIMIZE MOTHERHOOD.
People in the U.S. in the 25-45 age category have spent most of their adult lives in the world of optimization. Here are some of the things I can think of immediately that we optimize (or believe that we can):
Work spaces
Wardrobes (think, capsules and color wheels)
Schedules
Email for work
Household organization
Personality types
Dating apps
Fitness “journeys”
And yes, babies and parenthood.
We want to find the perfect answer to get a baby to “sleep through the night” and believe there must be a correct answer out there. We try feeding schedules and wake windows. We purchase sleep courses and fancy (read: expensive) sound machines. And I’m not here to condemn you because I, too, own many products to try to optimize sleep and feeding and life.
But as I mentioned at the start, I have the gifts of perspective and time with this second baby. And I’m realizing more and more that we cannot optimize children, and we cannot optimize being mothers.
Babies are not computers or robots and of course, neither are we. You will have good, easy days with your baby where the stars align and sleep is great and smiles abound. Other days, you’ll settle for a bag of chips on your chest at the end of the night watching the monitor with bleary eyes just waiting for the next dreaded wake up (ask me how I know all of these details).
As a mother or parent, you are also not able to optimize yourself. You will lose your temper, cry in the bathroom, wonder how you’ll ever finish your work and make it to daycare on time, leave the house with your shirt on backwards and make pb&js for dinner three nights in a row. Your baby will cry a lot some days. Your kids will get sick and everyone will feel like they’re melting by noon.
All of this will happen. Because we are HUMANS. We have flaws alongside our greatness. We have short tempers alongside our sweet moments. We have tears next to laughter. We have sad, depressed days and happy, glowing days.
And that is okay.
As you walk through the day, remember: you are a human. A great human, but a human. We can’t and should not try to optimize motherhood.
