The Best Laid Plans of Moms and Men

Creating structure, grasping at control, embracing peace of heart

Photo by Laurent Perren on Unsplash

It’s been about a year since I first read Holly Pierlot’s A Mother’s Rule of Life and decided that creating Rule of Life would be the one thing that would save my sanity. That if I could just put in the work up front and schedule out every free minute of my day, then nothing would ever go wrong, my chores would always get done, and I’d never hit a wall at 6:45pm with two overtired children screaming because they don’t want to go to bed.

Now, of course, the reality of children is that their ideal schedule (wake windows, naptimes, mealtimes, etc.) changes frequently, so this Rule would likely have to be updated frequently within the first year of each child’s life… perhaps we could make several versions to rotate through so that we wouldn’t have to rewrite the Rule every time a baby dropped a nap. Or maybe we could just write a draft now, but not start using it until after this current baby is down to one nap, since we’ll probably be in a stable schedule for at least a few months by then.

I was, as you can see, completely missing the point.

As I sat down to write this post, I wrote one sentence and then, for a little dopamine reward, I hopped onto Notes for a happy distraction, only to find this lovely piece on the cost of perfectionism by

Rebecca Faulks

shared by

Annelise Roberts

, whose newsletter

Writing While Washing

brings me so much life.

The Lord provides.¹

An excerpt from Rebecca’s reflection, to convince you to pause this and go read her beautiful words:

This may come as a surprise, but I have missed the mark of achieving my version of perfection this week… again. Obviously, I’ve responded well by analytically pressing those failures through the graceless cheesecloth of my self-righteous ideal, and then mercilessly wringing out the remaining threads. Self-flagellation gets results, right??? Please tell me I’m not the only one stuck in this cycle.

I know that striving for “perfection”— for a flawless performance that fools the audience into believing it is easy— allows no space for actual mistakes or missteps. I know that such “Perfection” deflates the surprisingly clumsy and comical bright spots in everyday life. It flattens the spontaneous interactions that allow virtue and compassion to shine in the face of human limitations. These impossibly high standards turn on the low-quality interior vacuum of shame, and I find myself rolling that useless dirt devil repeatedly over the same spot, asking with increasingly panicked exasperation, “how come this mess keeps getting worse!?”

Seriously, go read it.

Welcome back. Wasn’t that worth the detour? This theme of perfectionism, of feeling like I can’t hack it when I should be able to, resonated so strongly with the themes I’ve been wrestling with: control and surrender, the desire to feel like a good—or even just a good enough—mother, wife, and homemaker. I hope you’ll keep Rebecca’s wisdom in mind as you continue reading; I know I will as I continue writing.

All this brings us to the central question I want to explore today, the question that has been sitting in this draft for months, the barest reminder of where I wanted to go with this frankly amazing title and byline.

When does a Rule of Life become an idol? When does it cause more anxiety than it relieves? And when does our information-overloaded twenty-first century parenting style give us an unattainable illusion of control?

I’ve written before about our experiences of meal planning and family dinner, family prayer, and even (at length!) applying St. Benedict’s Rule to family life. I have drafts planned or started talking about baby-led weaning, contact naps, and education’s role in the life of the child. There’s still a chance that December’s posts will be a series of one-off book reviews on homemaking, marriage, and parenting. In other words, I have a Very Strong Desire to fully understand the different elements that go into effective home management, child-rearing, and relationship-building.

I want to pretend that this is some very holy desire to, you know, be the best “me” I can be, to really lean into and live out with joy the vocation to which the Lord is calling me.

But if I’m being honest, a lot of my obsession with interest in these topics stems from a desire to control my life. To have some predictability and familiarity in a season that is profoundly unpredictable and often unfamiliar. I recently spoke about the need for flexibility in family life:

Flexibility is so so important. Both in the sense of having a plan and in the sense of being willing to deviate from it when the need arises. This is something that I’ve really struggled with, again, until we had two under two and I was trying to make everyone’s naptimes happen on time every day. But being forced into a daily situation where something always goes “wrong”, something always gets forgotten at home, someone always needs a potty trip or a diaper change at an inconvenient time… it’s also taught me a lot about being flexible with the way I manage our home. I want structure. I want control. I want to do the same thing on the same day of the week every week until I die. And that’s just not how life works, so I’m learning on the job how to roll with the punches a little more.

I really think that, in this world where we can instantly access information about infant sleep, human nutrition, productivity and optimization hacks, and more, we’ve come to believe that if we can just make the right tweaks to our lifestyle, we can control everything. We think we can, as Rebecca said above, earn the mercy we crave. Maybe, sure, we can’t achieve moral perfection, but we can definitely achieve Expert Homemaker Status (TM) and satisfy all our needs and all our kids’ needs and all our spouse’s needs and all our friends’ needs and…

You know how it goes.²

You’ll be terribly surprised to know, I never did finish writing that Rule of Life. I couldn’t quite get it right, and I wasn’t willing to risk it “not working” so I just… abandoned the project.

I’ve spoken with several other mothers-of-very-young-babies recently about our respective children’s sleep habits, and the temptation to analyze our days to death in desperate search for repeatable results overnight. If baby only wakes up once overnight, we strive (in reality or at least in our imagination) to replicate that day over and over, as if identical naptimes—regardless of any other circumstances—will solve our sleep deprivation problem. As if there’s no human element involved, no baby who will go through developmental leaps, through weeks of teething, through illness or tummy troubles. When these hacks don’t “work” the way I expect, I find myself getting anxious or irritated—why can’t I figure it out? What am I doing wrong?

Why isn’t this working?

What am I doing wrong?

This is when, if I am attentive to the movements of my heart, I begin to notice that I have allowed my desire for order to morph into a grasping at control. Good fruit does not come of this grasping; rather, the fruit I begin to see is anxiety at every naptime and meals, frustration that “no one else cares about my family enough to help me meet their needs”, and exhaustion and self-victimization that lead inevitably to explosive, un-reasoned anger.

On the other hand, when I vacillate to the opposite extreme, to the outright rejection of any semblance of routine or accountability, I begin to see my sanity unravel. The fruit that grows on this tree is irritation taken out on my children, exasperation with my husband, and endless self-pitying impotence when it comes to meeting my own basic needs.

Neither of these extremes leaves me feeling at peace, able to rest and rejoice in the will of God for my life. Surely there must be another way.

And, of course, there is. There is a way laid out by saints and thinkers throughout the centuries and lived out by countless more unseen holy men and women. I’ve quoted this passage from Jean Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence before, but it’s worth sharing again:

There is no moment when God is not present with us under the appearance of some obligation or some duty. All that is effected within us, about us, and through us involves and hides His divine action: it is veritably present, though in an invisible manner; therefore we do not discern it, and only recognize its workings when it has ceased to act. Could we pierce the veil which obscures it, and were we vigilant and attentive, God would unceasingly reveal Himself to us, and we would recognize His action in all that befell us. At every event we would exclaim, Dominus est!—It is the Lord! and we should feel each circumstance of our life an especial gift from Him.

The middle way is to hold that balance carefully: to make a plan but hold it lightly. To allow for interruptions without giving in to distraction or laziness. To humbly acknowledge what we can and cannot do, can and cannot control.³ To ensure that our plan of life leaves time and space for adequate rest, adequate nutrition, and adequate time for personal pursuits—this is straight from St. Benedict!—in a way that is proportionate to our season of life.⁴ In short, we do our best to put our spiritual house in order, and having done so, we trust that everything that comes our way—good, bad, easy, hard, consoling, or heart-wrenching—is willed or allowed by God. It is where we can meet Him in the daily living of our lives, where He is calling us to obedience, to acceptance, to surrender.

And when, as is inevitable, we fail at this, we begin again. We apologize to those we have spoken to unkindly, treated with less than the respect they deserve. We go to Confession, to set ourselves right with the Lord and to receive special graces to grow in the virtues we’ve struggled with. And we say, with confident trust that the Lord will provide, that we will take up our crosses once again and follow Christ through Calvary into the Resurrection.

God has placed me in this state of life; in this and no other I must serve him and be saved. All the circumstances and events in my state of life, such as the different characters of the persons with whom I interact, the events that take place, the times and places in which these occur, reveal the order of Providence through which the Lord has willed to work my salvation. I must adapt myself to all these things and not think that I can force them to adapt themselves to me. And so, I will always try to adapt to these with peace and joy of heart, confident that God knows better than I what is best for me.

- Overcoming Spiritual Discouragement, No. 57, emphasis mine

In other words, because I cannot change the external realities of my life, I can (try to!) step away from the table. I can stop trying to control things, instead focusing that energy on the effort (sometimes Herculean) to remain peaceful and joyful and trusting.

To be sure, this is easier said than done. I’m writing to myself today, friends. I’m searching for a prayer that encapsulates all of this, that can remind me in the midst of yet another overnight feeding or yet another emo internal monologue that needs to be redirected, that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

1. I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek because my writing habit, while technically functional, is ridiculous, and it’s absolute grace upon grace that sometimes the Lord speaks to me in my frantic hopping around. But also. Y’all. The Lord provides. In a wild, beautiful, hard-to-believe kind of way.

2. As it happens, I actually believe very strongly in age-appropriate sleeping habits, in adequate nutrition, and in routines that keep stress low and virtue-building high! I believe very strongly in the power of a Rule of Life to free up mental space, reduce decision fatigue, and cultivate a habit of obedient surrender, thus allowing us to thrive where we are planted and grow into the role the Lord has for us. But I struggle, personally, to know how to use these tools well. I flip-flop between embracing them as a type of sacrilegious sanity-saver and rejecting them outright as completely useless.

3. This way, of course, requires sacrifice. Perhaps it requires pruning our social calendar, adjusting our expectations on the baseline state of our home, or choosing to rely more heavily on friends and family for support, even when asking for help is a muscle that we desperately need to stretch. On that last item, this piece by

Kaitlin Rogers

wrecked me, an oldest daughter married to an oldest son, raising a very emotional oldest daughter. How do I pass on a skill set I do not yet have?

4. There is, of course, something to be said for fasting, for waking early for prayer, for finding and making do on the least amount of physical needs rather than giving room for gluttony or acedia to sprout up; however, in my experience, this is not the struggle of most mothers—we are already pushing ourselves past our limits, whether out of necessity or the assumption of necessity or a twisted desire to prove that we have it worse than the rest of our families. In these cases, what we need in order to grow in authentic virtue is to ensure that our needs are being met, not to ensure that we’re fasting enough to “earn our mercy” (a reference to Rebecca’s post linked at the top of this one).