How Do I Manage My Newborn’s Life If Planning Things Stresses Me Out?
Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector’s Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Billy answers a question about how a non-planner can adapt to the meticulously planned life of parenthood.
Nick:
My wife and I are expecting our first child soon. I have lived my life thus far without keeping a calendar. If necessary, I’ll write ‘appt. 7/30 8:30 AM’ on a sticky note and leave it on the fridge. This system has worked well for me (sometimes, I miss a party, but if I didn’t remember it, I didn’t really want to go anyways), but my wife, no doubt correctly, warns that this strategy will be no longer tenable once our bundle of joy/screaming potato enters the world. I find making a calendar stressful and tedious (hence my avoidance). Do you have any tips for how I can ensure everything gets done and everyone gets to the place they need to go at about the right time, without resorting to the evils of Google Calendar? Or is that simply my fate?
It’s not so much that becoming a parent fundamentally changes a person, but more that it completely rearranges your priorities. For instance, before becoming a parent I was chronically planphobic, where even a whiff of a timeline or due date or deadline was enough to cause me to damn near break out into hives. Since becoming a parent, I am mostly still that person, though I am also much more aware of things like snack times and nap schedules, and have learned to appreciate the sanity-preserving value of the managed expectations that come with a well-planned day. If I’m right, Nick, and your resistance to calendar upkeep comes from a similar distaste for the tedium of planning, I’m here to tell you that you are neither doomed to fastidious accounts of every second of your day, nor do you have to resign yourself to regularly missing doctor’s appointments and soccer practices. And the best news is that the changes should all happen pretty seamlessly.
For the pre-parenthood segment of our relationship, my hatred for planning ahead, and my wife’s opposing preference for planning far in advance of things, was a source of consistent, mostly mild friction for us. The common case involved vacations, where she’d always want to block out the dates and buy the plane tickets and pack for the airport on a timeline that was pretty much the exact inverse of mine, the clock for which only started at the last conceivable minute. In our individual lives we’d both done perfectly fine managing the world on our polar-opposite schedules, and even after we’d gotten together, our dueling preferences weren’t all that difficult to reconcile, since the conflicts were rare and the stakes low. Predictably, this all changed when we learned we were having a child.
Because of the biological realities of pregnancy, the discovery that you will soon have a baby on your hands is a starkly different experience depending on whether you will or will not be harboring this proto-human inside your own body. For the birthing partner, your life is completely transformed the moment you learn you’re pregnant. For the non-birthing partner, learning your partner is with child is a little like opening a college acceptance letter as a high school senior: The news is incredibly exciting, and you know it’s going to change your life, but nevertheless your day-to-day situation is going to be mostly the same as before for the better part of a year. An effect of this for me and my wife was that, once we learned we were having a baby, our different approaches to planning went from a source of mild friction to being the epicenter of repeated, major earthquakes.
The physical changes in my wife’s body made evident to her that change was not only coming, but was already here, and so it was imperative that she immediately start preparing for D-Day. I of course also understood that change was coming, but it all felt a long way off, and so things like buying pacifiers and onesies, refashioning our guest room into a nursery, and reading parenting books didn’t seem terribly urgent. Nine months is a long time! Surely there would be plenty of time to do all the prep stuff even if we went at my normal, leisurely pace! Why the big rush? Needless to say, my arguments were not convincing to her, and so we would routinely get into arguments about this kind of stuff. Her first pregnancy remains easily the most contentious period of our entire relationship.
After talking about it in depth, what became clear was that part of my wife’s anxious drive to prepare for every little thing as soon as possible was that she knew things would get unimaginably hectic once the baby arrived. She was concerned that my general lackadaisical approach to planning would spill over into parenting too, leaving her without an equal partner in all the thankless, tedious, but crucial scheduling work raising a kid requires. Pregnancy itself, and the daily physical and emotional transformation it entailed, upended her priorities and made clear to her the importance of planning ahead for it. But pregnancy didn’t alter my own priorities all that much, since its effects weren’t as immediate to me. That discrepancy heightened our already existing differences in how we go about preparing for things. I had no doubt that things would in fact change for me once the kid came, and so I felt strongly that her doubts about my involvement in the planning stuff weren’t entirely warranted, but it made sense why we found ourselves repeatedly butting heads over the issue.
As it turned out, we were both right. Mostly she was right, in the sense that the early days and weeks of parenting your first child are ABSOLUTELY, MIND-MELTINGLY PSYCHOTIC, and every little thing you can do ahead of time to make your life easier during that stretch is worth doing, starting the second your pregnancy test shows that little line. Her planning instinct especially helped us, seeing as our little guy came about three weeks early, right about the time I had finally started to think, OK, so now is when I think I’m going to start taking this impending parenting thing a little more seriously.
On the other hand, I too was right in thinking that the birth of our son would totally rearrange my priorities in the same way it had already done for my wife. I may not be a planner, but I am very meticulous, and so I quickly became the vessel in which we stored much of our day-to-day responsibilities: keeping track of doctor appointments, logging into our baby app the diaper changes and bowel movements, the nap duration and breast feeding sessions and breast-pump returns, making sure we always had clean bottles and pump parts on hand ahead of the next session. It’s not that I became a different person, but having the baby around, and having the interminable number of things to stay on top of in order to feel like you aren’t losing touch with reality while figuring out how to keep a helpless, non-verbal human alive, triggered the aspects of my personality that would indeed prioritize the kinds of things I would otherwise have put off. At this point, between my wife and me, I am probably the more cognizant of and fixated on adhering to our daily schedule. If planning ahead was stressful to someone like me in pre-parenting life, it has become a godsend to my life now, as the knowledge of what to do and where to be at any given point of the day helps make the chaos of parenting life so much more manageable.
Hm, I’m only now remembering that this is meant to be an “advice” column, not a “talk about your own hyper-specific experience for 1,000 words” column. To that end, the advice I’d give to someone like you, Nick, is to try not to stress too much about your stress. It’s good to stretch your planning skills ahead of the baby’s arrival, as it will help make the transition easier when the day finally comes. But you should also trust yourself and your coming parenting instincts, as they will in fact kick in and help you step up in the required ways.
Also, it’s worth knowing that the scheduling stuff may be pretty intense for the first few months, but things tend to relax on that front soon after, when it’s no longer so important to know the exact frequency and texture of each of the baby’s shits. And the good thing about the planning/tracking crush at the beginning is that you will gain a newfound appreciation for the joys of proactively staying on top of things, and the kid’s schedule will eventually become mostly second nature. Though I should warn you, this planning stuff is still pretty domain-specific. For instance, I am finishing writing this article a few minutes past the last conceivable minute. For better and for worse, it’s like I said earlier: Parenting both does and doesn’t change you.
