At Least Now I Can Eat Dinner at a Normal Time, or Something I Can Actually Control

First published June 10, 2008

Most people probably consider it an obvious choice to eat dinner with your child. It is, after all, the foundation of all those sitcoms we grew up with, isn't it? Remember Richie Cunningham ... eating hamburgers at Arnold's restaurant with The Fonz. Or ... the hijinks taking place in the otherwise unused kitchen during those forbidden episodes of Three's Company I snuck up past my bedtime to watch.

Now that I think about it, the only dinner eating on television I can remember seemed to take place during the once-a-year Thanksgiving episodes of Friends. Okay, so maybe that explains why, until last night, dinner as a family wasn't part of our family ritual.



Honestly, we figured with Mike getting home at seven o'clock, dinner as a family was sadly out of the question. By seven I am usually drawing a bath for Jake because I once read it's a good way to relax your child before bedtime. Never mind that Jake resists any such relaxing bath time properties and any modicum of tiredness the bath might inspire is cast off the second his father walks through the door.

In fact, the Daddy-inspired adrenaline mixed with a good dose of daylight savings time and a lack of decent curtains in any of the bedrooms upstairs makes bedtime a chore, so whoever does the honors tends to creep wearily downstairs to face a 9 p.m. dinner in front of the television.

You'd think we would have come up with a new plan a little bit sooner.

Not Even Recognizing When You (Wrongly) Think You're in Control 

What amazes me is that it never occurred to me to switch things up. Rundown as I was feeling, much as I absolutely hate eating dinner half an hour before going to bed, futile as the idea of buying blackout curtains for the bedroom seemed, I lost sight of the fact that the whole evening structure was malleable.

It's like I could only see little parts of it—the time at which we try to get Jake down, for example, or whether to bother with a bath. All I could do was fruitlessly move them around like a novice chess player facing off against Bobby Fisher.

One good thing about coming down from vacation, I suppose, is that some of your pre-vacation structure has receded from view, giving you a chance to build something new. Practically every night at Grandma's last week I whispered to Mike how lovely it was to let Jake stay up way too late so he plopped right off to sleep when we put him in a blessedly dark room. (Why oh why is it so hard for me to just order some cheap mini-blinds?) And every night we followed up this comment with shaky assurances that while a late bedtime would be easy, it wouldn't be good for us.

"We need time for us," we told each other, wistfully letting the sentence trail off as if the other would protest, "Oh, no, Jake can stay up with us until 11 every night and our relationship will suffer no damage."

And then, on the way home from our dinner stop in Knoxville Sunday night it came to me.

"Maybe," I ventured, "I'll just do Jake's bath before dinner, so we can all eat together at a decent time and then put him to bed."

"I'd sure like it," Mike said, which is the closest he will ever come to putting his foot down on the central child-rearing decisions like bedtime, meals, and what outfit to put on Jake in the morning.

Isn't it amazing when something you've known for a long, long time reconfigures itself into a pattern that makes it seem novel and exciting? I've known for months that Jake has lunch just before nap at school and sinks right off to sleep. But only when I saw the nap-after-lunch happen every day for a week at Grandma's did I manage to shake off the assumption that eating dinner makes Jake hyper and he needs a bath to calm him down before bed time.

False (it's his father's arrival that acts like his street meth) and false (at best, the kicking and screaming that accompanies removal from the bath and application of the diaper cream tires him out a little bit, but it emphatically does not calm him down).

So, too, I have struggled with ideas for how to get Jake to fall asleep in less than an hour of lying on the bed together.

My attempts so far have eliminated his bouts of climbing off the bed to walk around the room, hitting me in the face with the cord on the blinds, and leaning over the footboard to make faces at himself in the mirror. But all that's brought me is an eyes-wide-open boy pressing against me and sucking his thumb furiously as he kicks his legs, switches positions every few seconds, and rather strenuously sabotages his own attempts at falling asleep.

Did it ever occur to me he just isn't built for a 7:30 bedtime any longer? Sure, the evidence was hitting me in the face. And, okay, I have lately become aware that he sleeps 10 hours at night no matter what and will awaken at 5:30 in the morning if we really do get him to sleep at 7:30. Yet I couldn't get around the firm conviction that a seventeen-month-old should not go to bed at 9:00.

It was like the Stonehenge of putting your child to bed for me—something that has always been there, has some mysterious purpose I'd best not question, and might as well be immovable. Turns out it was really just a styrofoam model of Stonehenge, like the one in This Is Spinal Tap that is just 18 inches high instead of 18 feet.

We had a lovely evening last night, with a bath when Daddy got home and dinner together at the table. Okay, so Jake preferred cereal with milk to the brown rice with broccoli and mushrooms we were having, but he sat with us in his booster seat, brandishing his spoon and telling us, we surmised, about his day, and it was just plain fun. I felt like we were approaching the time when Jake will be so independent that I will be able to cook dinner or do some work even when he's in the house with me, a day when I will recover more of the self now flickering in the background of my life as a mother.

When we lay down on the bed at 8:30 he didn't exactly bonk right off to sleep, so maybe it wasn't a perfect solution. But it sure was better stumbling groggily downstairs at 9:00 knowing that my evening was not, as in the past, just beginning, but happily winding down.

Even When You Think You're Not in Control, You're Not in Control

After a while, the idea that we're not in control becomes easy to appreciate. Half an hour late for your appointment at the pediatrician's? Out of my control. Perennially behind on work? Got a toddler—I can't control it.

It's all true, of course. But children make it obvious that we're not in control. Because anyone who's tried to convince a toddler in the middle of a tantrum that he may not run down the hall with a ballpoint pen in his hand jabbing dangerously close to his eye knows that there is no such thing as control where one's children are concerned. We're just not as lucky in the other parts of our lives to have a young child pointing out the error of our ways every time we think we get to make the decisions.

Sure, I can decide that I'm going to practice yoga regularly, but that choice is always going to be subject to other factors, like my child being sent home from school with the sniffles or a pressing work project taking more time than I had anticipated. I can decide to move 2,500 miles to a city I've visited only a couple of times, but I can't control the directions in which my life will grow when I get there nor, sadly, how cold and long winter will turn out to be.

There are some places in life where we just assume we are in control because we don't examine them. We assume we control our choice of a job, a home, at the very least our children's bed time. But when you stop to think about it, we don't. Even the big things in life are subject to forces bigger than us, whether you want to call those forces god or nature or the market.

And so, once again, Jake taught me a lesson. I can set parameters for his bedtime; I can have an intention about when he should sleep. But he's the one who's going to shut his eyes when he's ready. Just as the right job, friendships, life as a mother will emerge from the choices I've made and the ones I don't get to make.

In the end, frustrating as the journey may be, I know ceding control is the right thing. Because Jake slept until a blessed 7:30 this morning, and we all finally got a good night's sleep.

A New Perspective on the Things You Don't Control -- Sarvangasana (Shoulderstand) 

Plainly, what I needed to let Jake and our family grow up a little bit was a change of perspective. One week being lazy about bedtime at Grandma's and when I settled back into the sameness of home, I was able to see something different. So, I reasoned, why not offer an asana that turns you upside down? What better way to clear your head?

Inversions—the poses where one turns upside down—are, in fact, recognized for doing just that. Your blood flows differently (not backwards, of course, but in a different response to gravity; think of putting your head down when you're nauseated). Everything looks different when your eyes are upside down. Your arms support your body for a change while your feet reach for the sky.

Sarvangasana is also a calming inversion, so its offers you a break from all the decisions you have to make during the day. It's a way of welcoming the lack of control, finding strength and calm in acceptance. Just because we're not in control, doesn't mean we get buffeted about by the forces around us. As sarvangasana teaches, it means sometimes we get to stand still and let it all happen around us. Kind of like watching our children grow up.