Good with one hand
First, get your head out of the gutter. Good. Let’s continue.
It’s amazing the things you forget. Forget might not be the right word, but since we brought baby #2 home from the hospital, the most common phrase out of my mouth and in my mind has been, “oh, right.” As in:
“Oh, right, it’s quicker to boil bottles”
“Oh, right, her umbilical cord turns black and falls off.”
“Oh, right, the first month is god awful.”
No one tells you that last one. Everyone talks about the beauty and gift that is a newborn. And, to be clear, it is. Being a parent is single-handedly the best and favorite thing I do. The first month, though, sucks. You don’t sleep, you still don’t know this little human that now lives with you… always, you’re covered in spit up, you haven’t seen a vegetable in weeks and there is no routine. Humans thrive on routine. We need routine. The first month has none. “Oh, right.”
The memory or rediscovery that I appreciate during this time of torment, though, is getting good with one hand. It is the physical embodiment of improvisation. Everything is with one hand. Pick up the burb cloth? One hand. Make a coffee? One hand. Clean the dining room? One… no one is cleaning the dining room, let’s be serious.
My wife and I use a baby tracker app that is an absolute life saver and I recommend for any new/veteran parents. When your living in “shifts” it is a game changer for staying on top of feedings and diaper changes. It avoids the awkward and potential dangerous practice of waking up your partner mid-shift to ask how if baby’s poop looked like mustard. The app is called Baby Tracker and you can get it on whichever store fits your fancy (I’m not important enough, so that’s just a free shout out for the app, no affiliate checks here).
At any rate, I was on morning duty the first or second day home and found myself trying to feed baby a bottle while holding her upright (some reflux) and logging the feed on the app. Improv takes over and you can see from the photo with this post, my upper lip got some reps while my free hand logged a feeding (and grabbed a selfie because it’s not real if there’s no picture for social media).
Novice improvisers often find the greatest struggle in letting go. We become so obsessed with having an entire game/scene figured out and in our control from the moment we start that nothing ever happens. Nothing progresses. We get stuck. The audience or classmates get bored or frustrated or both and, very often, it just devolves into a lot of yelling. Because what says control like needless yelling at and over someone else?
And so it is in improv and parenting. The proverbial first month sucks. We try to maintain control at all costs, we pretend as hard as possible and usually end up devolving into a partial emotional breakdown with a lot of yelling. It’s at this point that novice improvisers do one of two things- shift to pottery classes or slowly give up control, trust, flex and listen. In parenting, we don’t get the option of the pottery class. This is forever. So we stop, we breathe, we listen (both to our partner and our baby), we stop obsessing over controlling each day and we learn, instead, to respond to the day that presents itself.
Parenting has never been about control anyway. It’s been about presence, about showing up, about innovating and figuring it out and, “oh, right,” about getting really good with one hand.
