It's okay to be inconsistent

4 am wake-ups and abandoned plans

I had a much more elaborate post planned for today. I’ve been on a roll recently of translating the ideas that have lived in my head for so long and having them ready to post each week. I was excited about this next piece. It was deep and complex, a multilayered metaphor that helped me immensely during the postpartum phase.

I knew I needed a long chunk of time to write it, so I planned to set aside the afternoon today while my daughter took her daily, reasonably reliable, nap.

Then she woke up at 4 am this morning.

We nursed in the dark in the rocking chair for an hour.

Then I took her into my bed so she could lay her body in every configuration possible, while practicing every word she knows, for another hour.

Then, I gave up.

There is so much pressure to be consistent as a parent.

If you want your child to sleep through the night, you have to be consistent.

If you want them to take predictable naps, be consistent.

If you want them to learn how to regulate their nervous system, eat a variety of foods, not resist diaper changes, car rides, teeth brushing…you have to be consistent.

Consistency is touted as the antidote for every issue.

Meanwhile, children are the least consistent creatures on the planet.

Every day is different. Some mornings Iona eats all the eggs on her plate, other days she won’t touch them. Some afternoons she naps for two hours, other days she wakes up after half an hour. Some nights she wants to nurse to sleep, others she’s fine with dada putting her down.

It struck me this morning, as I was rocking with her in the dark, that children are inconsistent because life is inconsistent. Trees don’t always grow at the same rate. The weather is not the same day-to-day. The creek rises and falls. Birds sing one morning, and don’t the next.

Inconsistency is a fact of existence. It’s uncontrollable, unpredictable, natural.

Inconsistency isn’t a failure. It’s a pattern that we simply don’t understand yet. It’s a rhythm unto itself.

And yet— the pressure to be consistent seems to seep into every corner of a parent’s life. Consistent mealtimes, naptimes, playtimes, bedtimes. Consistent work times, shower times, cleaning times.

It’s exhausting, and often feels impossible—because it is.

We aren’t meant to be consistent day after day. To bend ourselves into the same shape no matter what’s happening around us.

We were meant to respond to the world. To align with the whims of the changing weather. To move in the cool of morning and rest in the heat. To eat what’s fresh and flowering. To stay up late in the summer and go to bed early in the winter. To have seasons of growth, and seasons where we’re simply laying fallow.

If you look around, you’ll see that no living being on Earth is consistently consistent. To be consistent all the time is to strip ourselves of the very thing that makes us alive.

And so, it’s ok to not be consistent.

To know that sometimes it’s gonna be a 4 am wake-up, cranky baby, wonky nap kind of day. That you won’t return that phone call, or make it to the farmers market or cross that thing off your to-do list.

That things are not going to look the same from day-to-day or week-to-week. And more than just being okay…it’s actually lifegiving.

In the end, maybe what’s more important than a strict adherence to consistency, is our ability to model for our children what it looks like to accept life’s inconsistencies with grace.

To be flexible, to be humble, to have a sense of humor about it all.

To follow your own rhythms—the rhythm of your body, of the climate where you live, of the season you’re in.

Because if there’s anything I’d love for my daughter to know in her bones by the time she’s grown, it’s not the importance of staying consistent…

It’s the life-giving beauty of consistently having compassion for your changing, complex, nuanced, and entirely inconsistent self.