Sometimes when you’re deep in the gamut of raising babies you live in a phenomena that Matt and I call “treading water”. You’re not really getting anywhere closer to the island you’re just trying to stay above water and not drown. Maybe a floating plank gives you some respite for a while but mostly you’re gonna get back to treading water. Until one magical day… you don’t quite realize is it as it happens but your babies are sleeping in beds, sleeping all night, communicating, peeing in toilets, and you turn off the baby monitor all night. You’re no longer treading water. You’re able to swim toward a destination and even stop at little islands along the way and prolong drowning. Maybe even recreationally swim or enjoy a sunset.
Until that time you’re not really thinking long term. Which is actually good. Just surviving the day to day is the way to go. Suffice is the trouble for the day etc. But once survival becomes insufficient, the goals, identity, values, and dreams of your family materialize or start to form into matter that makes sense. All of a sudden you’re realizing what things, as a family, give you life and which suck it out of you. And WHO you are as a family. There’s an identity that is formed as a unit that as a concept I was unable to grasp until I was out of the trauma survival, including early childhood and a pandemic.
Now I can see a little more clearly who we are.
We been in this game 15 years and in that time, Matt and I have developed an identity and values as a family. Chief among them is that we are an organized and intentional family, which is kinda awesome and hugely unexpected. Matt and I are both fairly neat and organized people in general with our home and habits but I didn’t realize how much the organization was bleeding into our communal life as well. We are all about the calendar and what is happening when and what we can do to prepare for the upcoming event. We will talk about the day/weekend/what’s coming and work backwards.
Matt runs a tight ship with the kids’ daily schedule and has since they were babies. He has them regulated with food, naps, bedtime. He feeds them at 12:30p and 6pm and snack after school and the kids are so used to it that you could remove every clock in our house but one to check and I could tell you roughly what time it was by “I’m hungry”. I on the other hand, am not disciplined when it comes to time itself, the hours. I like to block out chunks of time and work within those hours on whatever thing I’ve committed is the priority. Currently as I am in a waiting time with work, I have mornings free and when the kids are in school the hours of 8:45a-11:45a are sacred and for quiet reflection and study. Or a walk or writing. There’s no order to when and how long I’ll do any one thing only that it’s blocked out and that gives me some order. My job currently only requires that I am at my desk for certain hours and at meetings for certain hours. My other job, on set: the hour by hour matters and counts in that big sense where 100 people are getting paid every 15 minutes we don’t stop to feed them lunch! I’m no stranger to the organization of time but am honestly not very good at the detailed daily time management. Working on it still!
But. I am getting much better at organizing our days and I’m seeing very fruitful results! One of the things I’m working on is an old spiritual organization tool called “Rule of Life”. Which to be honest I hate the name because it’s really not a rule it’s more of a layout of life or a blueprint of life priorities. The Rule of Life was begun by monks who lived in a monastery and they had their day organized to the minutes for prayer, reading, cooking. All their days, weeks, months, years built on the things they prioritized which was living a spiritual life with God. Sort of a trellis where you build on it. Honestly I couldn’t think of analogies that work in explaining the Rule of Life. Our church has one where we focus on certain things at certain times of the year. I had been wanting to make one myself and wasn’t realizing that that’s what I was doing when on one of my annual solo trips I jotted this down in my notes app:
I was trying to find a way to re-organize my days, my life to make room and time for my priorities. In the same way that every week God made a Sabbath, a day of rest, my family had made days dedicated to alone time and couple time and family movie night. And then I wanted more of it. And then I wanted to pin that time in our life so that nothing else would invade it. I wanted to organize our days so we would never feel pressure about making time for the things that matter because we already wrote the things that matter into our life and family calendar.
One thing that Matt keeps talking about as we’ve journeyed into a healthy life and particularly a healthy spiritual life is that discipline = freedom. And it sounds completely ass backwards because discipline is one of those words that carries such weight and a ruler I’ll never measure up to. How can it be freeing to have to make yourself do something hard? BUT when you discipline your calendar, then you’re free with your time. When you already have a set time for a meeting, you never have to waste time setting up the meeting. When you make dedicated weekly time to talk and check in and connect, you never have to feel disconnected for too long because you know the connect time is at worse, 7 days away. Regularity is great for pooping and sleeping. Regularity is good for your life. Consistency. Order. It is incredibly freeing.
You all know I will scream ’til I’m blue in the face about how good for me it’s been to have a Solo Sunday night every single week for my sanity. Matt and I added a Meaningful Monday where we are just us no TV that’s been so great for us. The rest of our time falls around those times. We know what to say no to because we have those things we say yes to.
As I continued thinking about the concept of ordering our life I, for some reason, wanted to practice and still wish to practice learning how to make a French omelette. I was on Youtube watching Jacques Pepin make one and on third viewing I noticed his ‘mise en place’ setup. Do you know the concept? It’s what chefs do when they’re making a meal where all the ingredients have been properly measured and prepped and are lined up in little bowls near them while they’re cooking. So when it’s time to add onion, the onion is right there waiting. They don’t have to stop what they’re doing, grab a knife and cutting board and onion out of the pantry and cut it up. The onion is ready for the next step. As are all the other ingredients for the dish. They disciplined their prep and now they were free to cook. It was the only concept that finally clicked.
So I drafted my own Rule of Life and as I looked at the finished product I thought: this is a good life. If I do these things, this is a solid, balanced, joyful, fulfilled life. Order in our days. Freedom to live.
