Too many good things
Facing my own limitations.
A couple of weeks ago, I helped my friend D get a haircut.
She’s a new mom, and her husband is back at work full-time. Can you imagine a cherubic little dude sitting on your lap while being showered in hair confetti? Or trying to enjoy a luxurious head massage while he teeters on your thighs?
When D asked me to help her out, my obvious answer was “duh.” I love this baby very much, and I also want her to know that she doesn’t have to bear the entire load of parenthood alone.
Both D and I are friends with our hairdresser, who has a private studio that doubles as a greenhouse full of plants with an inspiring zest for life. We spent the morning yapping and sipping coffee while I snuggled our little guy and carried him to each mirror saying, “Look, that’s you.” The haircut was a highlight of my week.
But there were consequences.
I had to push my bakery shift back from 8:00 a.m. until noon to make it work. Not a big deal! That is, until I snapped a prong on the whisk of our industrial-sized mixer. (This is akin to being a synchronized swimmer without a pool.)
Mechanics are not my forte, so I was there until 8:30 p.m. trying to troubleshoot the situation. Already on the knife’s edge of burnout, I’d intended a long bath that night, but instead I got home too late and accrued even more sleep debt before my 5:00 a.m. shift the following morning.
So, what should I have done here? Ditch the soul-nourishing baby time?
Infamous among my nearest and dearest for being paralytically indecisive, I struggle to make choices of almost any magnitude.
I cannot ever pick which cocktail I want from the menu, and generally have a “get them both” kind of attitude. If two fun plans are offered on the same Saturday, I’ll run myself ragged doing both instead of focusing on one. When thinking about my husband’s family in the U.S. and mine in Australia, I default to: We’ll just spend time in both countries!
Obviously, I know intellectually that time is a finite resource. That I can only ever truly be in one place, and that by choosing this life path I am leaving countless others on the table. I think this is why my propensity to vacillate feels so cozy: I get to swaddle myself in the illusion that I’m having it all.
As Haley Nahman writes in Maybe Baby, one of the crueler fates of adulthood is that the things we value tend to accumulate faster than the hours we can devote to them. What looks like overcommitment is often a life bursting at the seams with more loves, more obligations, and more identities than can effortlessly coexist at once. In her words:
“There’s a pragmatic school of thought that argues there’s always a correct choice to be made when it comes to prioritizing one thing over another.
You’d think parenting would slot nicely into this framework (nothing more important than your children!), but when you understand your ability to show up as a parent as intertwined with your ability to rest, nourish your body, make money, clean and manage your house, tend to your relationships, grow and care for your village, live your principles, etc, the calculation is quickly muddled.
These ‘priorities’ can’t all be met at the same time, no matter how much you value them individually.”
When it comes to hanging out with a dope baby, I’d happily accept tiredness as the price just about 100% of the time.
But more often than not, prioritization seems to be less about what millennial burnout discourse would have us believe — trimming the fat from our lives — and more about making peace with one essential thing inevitably outranking another essential thing.
Do you spend an hour on the phone with a grieving friend or use it to meet the urgent work deadline that pays your medical bills? Do you take on your dream creative project knowing you’ll see your family way less that year? Do you go on a restful weekend camping trip if it’s going to make Monday absolute hell?
These are admittedly privileged problems, but there is a quiet, creeping kind of grief that comes with the constant cost-benefit crunching of adulthood. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum gets right to it in a 1988 PBS interview with Bill Moyers:
“I think this idea that often, when we care about more than one thing, and care deeply, the very course of life will bring you around to a situation where you can’t honor both of the commitments, and it looks like anything that you do will be wrong in some way, will be perhaps even terrible in some way, and this is true.”
“And I think if you really feel what it is to love someone or some commitment, and be bound to that, then when a conflict arises, you will feel deep pain. And you will feel what Agamemnon felt, even at a smaller level. You will feel, ‘Which of these is without evils?’”
There’s something comforting, I think, in this articulation.
While most of us will never have to choose between sacrificing our child or sacrificing all of mankind, legitimate but incompatible desires are genuinely tragic (you know, in the Greek sense). The cost of a big, beautiful life is that it will eventually ask you to set aside something you love — maybe even something you need.
And that’s not a problem to solve so much as it is one to mourn.
Anyway! Your turn:
Where in your life are you trying to keep all of the balls in the air instead of making a choice?
In what way is your indecision protecting you?
Is there a small but meaningful decision you could make in your life right now that could set you free?
