Slow Learning

Hav­ing a new­born is a les­son in many things — in fact, one could prob­ably write one of those “Everything I Needed to Know About ABC I Learned From DEF” (try typ­ing that into Amazon, there are some inter­est­ing titles in the res­ults that show up, includ­ing “Everything I Needed to Know about Busi­ness– I Learned from a Cana­dian” and “Everything I Know About Women I Learned From My Tractor”).

1. The top les­son would have to be patience — when you think that almost 6 weeks after being born, the baby is still not in much of a routine (well, she some­times has a nap in the morn­ings, and she inev­it­ably wakes up and wants to be fed just as we put food on the table for us, no mat­ter what time that is, unless I wake her up to feed her first). Even­tu­ally babies can get to a routine of sorts, but it can take a long time. So you just keep try­ing. Even if it takes weeks.
2. The next would be just how much you can get done when sleep-deprived, and when to recog­nise that you really do need a break. Doing some­thing when you’re sleep-deprived is fine when the qual­ity of the end res­ult isn’t import­ant, or it’s easy to do (it’s hard to really go wrong put­ting laun­dry in the wash­ing machine) but hav­ing to redo things because you mucked up the first time is annoy­ing. Sleep depriva­tion often equals not think­ing prop­erly, or for­get­ting import­ant aspects, or over­weight­ing unim­port­ant aspects, of any­thing you’re think­ing about. And drink­ing cof­fee only helps a little if you’re really sleep-deprived (and too much cof­fee just makes the baby fussy any­way, so it’s self-defeat­ing). I keep lists for lots of things, it’s the only way to make sure noth­ing import­ant is forgotten.
3. Which leads me to effi­ciency — when the baby only naps for short peri­ods, and you need to get things done (blog post­ing, shower­ing), you can­’t pro­cras­tin­ate or muck about. If it needs to be done, you need to do it in the few minutes you have, oth­er­wise you may not have anoth­er chance until tomor­row. Or next week. Or next month. And you really need to pri­or­it­ise (which explains why I haven’t been post­ing much, showers take pri­or­ity if I only have time for one of those in a day).
4. Break­ing action items into steps is also neces­sary. Since the naps might be short, which will only give you a few minutes at any giv­en time, you need to have stop­ping points all the way along and a sys­tem to remem­ber quickly where you were. Unfor­tu­nately this does­n’t work when you need to think deeply about some­thing, but there’s the think­ing time you get while nurs­ing, which you can try to use, assum­ing sleep depriva­tion, see (a), does­n’t make it a waste of time. Or you don’t nod out while nurs­ing (I haven’t yet, but I’ve come awfully close). And you have to fig­ure out how many items you can stand to have going at any one time, so the house or com­puter isn’t overly littered with items in vari­ous stages of completion.
5. And finally, the need for bal­ance. I take walks to the corner to clear my mind and get me out of the house, with or without the baby depend­ing on wheth­er someone at home can mind her; this gives me some bal­ance and a chance to be a per­son in my own right rather than solely “moth­er”. Being a per­son and not solely a whatever-your-job-is, no mat­ter how inter­est­ing or import­ant or ful­filling that job, is equally import­ant to life’s bal­ance in the work life. It seems to me that every­one I know is busier than they were a few years ago (maybe it’s just the people I know) and they’re hav­ing to work harder at find­ing that elu­sive bal­ance, while at the same time real­ising more how import­ant it is.

Time is mov­ing slowly right now, like mov­ing through treacle or molasses. I’m blam­ing it on the sleep depriva­tion; I have to be care­ful what I do and how I do it and think­ing straight isn’t all that easy. Once the baby starts sleep­ing for longer at nights it’ll be easi­er. In the mean­time, I’m learn­ing patience. Slowly.