YOU’RE THE KEEPER
Ummon said, “The world is vast and wide. Why do you put on your seven-piece robe at the sound of a bell?”
—Gateless Gate, case 16
Here’s a word to get all worked up about: schedule.
Some people say babies should be on schedules. Some say not. Everyone agrees that a schedule would be nice for the adults lying about on call, but that’s where the agreement ends. This question of a baby schedule is not a piddling thing. Oh, no, you’ll soon find out if you haven’t already: it requires allegiance to a chosen parenting method. Or better yet, a system. As part of a philosophy. Inspiring a crusade. With books, seminars, and support groups. Dividing moms into warring sides, each armed to defend her irrefutable rightness and attack the irredeemable wrongness of the other.
Like all wars, the battle between opposing parenting philosophies is fought to win the peace—that tiny parcel of peace between you and your baby. Put all of this ruckus in perspective and you might decide to leave the army of experts out of it and negotiate this peace yourself. If you do, you will come by a schedule the same way you arrive at anything: step by step, over and over, little by little, and on your own.
Wait a minute, you insist. You have a book that tells you otherwise. You have a book that tells you in advance the right way to bond, breast-feed, hold, respond to, and sleep with your baby in the same bed every day and night. You have a book that goes far beyond a schedule; it promises that your child will have a more successful, secure, and intelligent life if only you do what the book says.
Sounds compelling, but try to stay on neutral ground. It helps, sometimes, to be a delinquent in this debate, to leave the pages unturned, the advice unheard. It helps to be clueless.
I was clueless, and I am still grateful. Being a free agent in the parenting wars doesn’t prevent difficulties or desperation, but it also doesn’t delude you with dogma. It doesn’t lure you into thinking you know something when you don’t. It doesn’t multiply your doubts when reality diverges from your expectations. It doesn’t hold you back from trying things a different way. Above all, it doesn’t blind you to the obvious. More than analyzing theories or applying techniques, arriving at a schedule is about recognizing the obvious.
Of course, it takes time to see things as they really are.
During her hospital stay, the nurses fed Georgia on a three-hour schedule. As she ate more at a feeding (a whopping two ounces!), she graduated to every four hours. She had hit a milestone in the neonatal curriculum, and voilá, she was discharged smack dab into my dunderheaded care.
“I think I’ll just keep her on that four-hour schedule,” I mused as we drove to the hospital to bring her home. I was already imagining her rapid progress up the curve. Four hours, five hours, fork and spoon. The doctor there nearly laughed when I asked the question just to confirm my good sense. “Oh, no, at home you’ll feed her on demand,” she corrected.
Demand? She was a four-pound three-ounce cricket, still four weeks shy of full-term consciousness, and I hadn’t as yet detected a single demand. That changed as she approached what had been her original due date. Her growing awareness of her growing belly, when it was growing empty, put the world in motion. So this is what a newborn does! Empty tummies are a time bomb. Babies schedule themselves, and you simply don’t get a say, not at first.
Wait a minute, you insist again. You have a book that tells you otherwise. You have a book that tells you just what you want to hear when you see for yourself what an awful lot of bother real babies are. You have a book that speaks volumes to the sleep deprived. It says things like: Parents matter, too! You are the boss! Train your baby now! And more than a book, you have a friend who has a friend who testifies that the method really works and after the crying stops, her baby goes to sleep smiling.
Sounds appealing, but try to stay on neutral ground.
Soon your baby will enter a stage when he is more than just a hunger pang. He is awake. He moves about. He can be engaged and entertained. And you ask yourself, “Are we on a schedule?” You ask your fellow mothers, “Are you on a schedule?” You all confess, “We’re not on a schedule yet.” Yippee! No one is scoring in the bonus rounds yet.
I read in one of those books of yours (I peeked) that if I kept track of the time and amount of my baby’s meals and the time and duration of her naps, a schedule would appear. I have two spiral notebooks, with all the times and measurements, for 365 days, and while she never missed a meal, nothing appeared on those hen-scratched pages. But something does appear over time, and when it does, it appears right in front of your eyes.
Did you ever notice that summer follows spring? That April follows March? Wednesday follows Tuesday? That sunset follows sunrise? And that it does so every day with such extreme predictability that the exact times can be calculated with flawless precision and printed in an almanac a year in advance? All of life is balanced on the precise and predictable unfolding of events. Your child’s life is no exception.
Are you aware that your breathing weaves a uniform pattern, your heart beats in faultless cadence, and your body functions in continuous, self-regulated flow? Your baby doesn’t need you to impose a schedule, least of all one from a Web site or a book; your baby is a schedule of sequential events at predictable times. What she needs is for you to see it. Your baby doesn’t need an imperious schedule maker but an attentive timekeeper.
This is your new spiritual practice: telling time. Fortunately for both of you, this practice brings many rewards.
Zen students regularly participate in extended meditation retreats, which are called sesshins. The aim of a sesshin is to put aside your self-centered preoccupations and clear your mind so you can see things as they are. A sesshin might last three, seven, ten, or many more days, but during sesshin each day is the same. Sesshin days follow a schedule originated in Japanese Zen monasteries and based on thousands of years of observing human functioning. The schedule combines periods of sitting meditation with walking meditation, chanting, chores, rest, and meals. All activities follow in the same orderly sequence and occur each day at the same hour. Time is marked by the timekeeper, who ceremonially rings a bell at the beginning and the end of allotted periods. Every time a bell rings, you know exactly what to do. With a few days of practice, you know exactly what to do when there are no bells. Your mind is clearing, and you are more aware.
This sounds quaint. What is not quaint is the murderous rage you feel, at first, as your ego flares up against the discipline. We don’t like to be ruled by the clock, or anything else for that matter. We like to be in charge of our own time: to own it, use it, waste it, lose track of it, and sleep through it. We like to sneak in, out, and around time. We like to be early; we like to be late; we like what we like when we like it! The world is vast and wide, our reasoning goes, why be entrapped by a timepiece?
A few days into the iron-walled refuge of a sesshin, your resistance starts to dissipate and you notice something remarkable. You thought you’d feel lousy, but you feel better. You used to stay up all hours, but now you’re nodding off at 9:00 P.M. You never used to rest, but you’ve been napping. At first you were exhausted, but now you feel energized. You’re usually late, but you’ve been on time. You habitually skip meals, but three squares a day never tasted so good. At this point, more bells go off. So this is what it feels like to live a healthy life!
Isn’t this all you really want for your child? When you begin to take notice, it becomes clear what to do about time.
You’ll notice the time when you can drop the early-morning feeding and replace it with a solid-food “breakfast.” You’ll notice the time when you can delay the late-afternoon snack and combine it into “dinner.” You’ll notice the times when your child is tired. If you tell yourself that your child never acts tired, you will have many more times to see how your child acts when he is tired.
When my daughter passed infancy and started freestyling toward toddlerhood, her voluntary napping disappeared, or diminished into odd times and inconvenient places. My instincts told me that sleeping was inherently good for her; her deteriorating temperament told me when she had passed her breaking point. Would she easily give in to repose? Not on your life. There is a benevolent power in parenthood, and I believe napping is one place it should be exercised.
Developmental guidelines say a ten-month-old should be napping twice a day, morning and afternoon. My spiral notebook told me that she was dozing here and there and sometimes never. Why? Perhaps because I had never created a nap time. Most babies don’t do that themselves; mommies do. So one day I watched for signs that she was tired, even in the midst of her nonstop activity—a wipe of her eye, a sudden tear burst. Bells went off. One at midmorning. One at midafternoon. It was nap time. I ritualized it with a routine: milk, stories, rocking, and whispered songs in a darkened room. Asleep she fell, my sweet girl. Every day at the same hour. Every time in the same way. She became predictable when I became predictable.
We had finally arrived at a schedule, one that would naturally grow and change as she did. At every step it was up to me to notice it in her, mark the time, and put myself on a schedule. When you do this, I promise you that every day, as the clock ticks, you’ll both know exactly what time it is.
Not long ago I met a gray and gracious woman at the park, where her four-year-old granddaughter rambled with Georgia. She remembered her own first days with her babies as though it were Wednesday last.
I had the two boys. Twins. I used to ask, “Oh, my Lord, why me?” If I could get the wash going by nine in the morning, why then . . . I’d clean the dirty diapers into the toilet and soak them in the tub. We had the tub by the washer back then, and these were cloth diapers. If I could get the wash going by nine, and then hung on the line, then I could get organized. I had to get organized by nine. And I learned that I was good at organizing.
She recalled this clockwork as though it were her finest hour. “I’m past seventy-two,” she said later, leaving me to guess whether she meant months or years past. The strength and certainty were still with her. Her secret to doing it was doing it on time.
Is this such a rare and insightful teaching? I don’t know, but on those nights when my husband and I are out catching a late dinner or a movie, we often find ourselves bobbing through a sea of strollers carting strung-out toddlers into the middle of the night. My child never sleeps. My child never eats. These refrains are like a new national anthem. It makes me wonder. Where did we lose the rhythm and flow from morning to noon to night? The iridescent beat of sunrise, the soothing tempo of twilight? The irrefutable day and inviolate night? Who took away time? It’s up to you to find it.
I am devoted to the schedule. I am devoted to routine to maintain physical and mental health. For my daughter, yes, but above all for me. The structure lends security. The focus gives me sanity. The predictability begets, in a paradoxical way, freedom. The simple ceremony of ritualized activity dignifies our ordinary lives. We eat our cereal and then we wash our bowls. We brush our teeth and then we comb our hair. We put on our socks and then our shoes. Perfect mastery, moment after moment.
As my daughter has grown older, I have seen how useful my compulsion has been to her. It reassures her that, even when it’s not entirely on her terms, her life is predictable and safe. And as I have grown wiser, I have likewise seen when my compulsion serves no one, when it provokes needless urgency and anxiety rather than calm. That’s when it’s time to unwind myself from the clock and appreciate life’s unpredictability.
On a perfect day in your perfect little world (and it’s always perfect) there is breakfast time, playtime, lunchtime, nap time, snack time, dinnertime, bath time, story time, and bedtime. There is time for everything when you are the timekeeper.