Hey friends. Are you recovered from Daylight Savings yet? Trick question, there is no recovering from Daylight Savings until it hits us again in fall. Every parent knows Daylight Savings was invented by someone who has no children, doesn’t know any children, was never a child, and isn’t quite sure what a child is. It’s okay Daylight Savings people, we know you never had a chance at getting this right. But in light of the great debate right now about how to handle Daylight Savings from angry people everywhere, let me tell you some timely (ha, see what I did there?) lessons that I learned from having children that may help.
You can’t fight the natural order. This is a hard and tragic truth, but it will help everyone if we don’t try to pretend it doesn’t exist. Take babies, for instance. They sleep in small blocks, eat like fifty times a day, and have powerful little lungs. If I go into parenthood expecting to get ten straight hours shuteye every night, I am a deluded fool. That’s not how things work. The same thing is true of the rotation of the earth. The sun rises, the sun sets. It’s nice to go to bed when it’s dark and wake up when it’s light, but if you want to do that in the summer, you’re going to get like an hour of sleep. You can swap around daylight hours as much as you want, but there’s still the same number of them no matter how you stack it. That’s just math. Maybe it’s common core math and that’s why no one gets it. But still basic math. Admitting it is the first step to acceptance, right? I really don’t know why there’s not a twelve step program for this.
Announcing something authoritatively does not make it so. Kids are a huge blow to the ego if you think you’re in control. You go into parenting thinking that if something’s not working you can just change it up, but turns out, those little minions have minds of their own and are not easily persuaded. I can stand up and say, with conviction, “Your new bedtime is 4 PM!” But is it? Is it really? Just because I pretend to be the monarch of our home doesn’t mean any of my laws are going to be popular with the peasantry. They’re just going to sit in their beds hollering for five hours and sneaking out to get snacks and buckets of water and still not go to sleep until they are tired. We’re just all going to be more miserable than if I let them run free and wild. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can tell me it’s now 8 o’clock instead of 7 o’clock, but my body knows better. The sky knows better. My two year old knows better. Come on now, let’s not get high on power. Next thing you know we’re going to start trying to convince elementary school kids that goldfish crackers aren’t a meal. Absolute madness.
It’s better to change my schedule to embrace that which I cannot change. I’m pretty sure there’s a Serenity Prayer out there for this, but I guess it’s not having much of an impact on the Daylight Savings authorities, so let me spell it out for you in parenting terms: You gotta pick your battles, folks. I can’t birth a bunch of little balls of opinions and expect my life to continue on its course unimpeded. We schedule our life around nap time, meals, and when our favorite shows are on. We don’t try to go to the store when it’s time to smear peanut butter on our bodies and practice sumo wrestling. This is folly. We accept what we cannot change. We don’t want to send kids to school in the dark? We’ll have to make school later. We want to wake up when the sun comes up? We go to bed earlier so we can be up at 4 AM. We want daylight to go skiing and snow sledding in the heart of winter? We institute a month long break from all work and educational activities in January so we can take care of important things. It’s not rocket science, people.
Whew. I’m glad we had this little chat. I feel better knowing we’re all going to be reasonable people and stop trying to pretend we have any control over anything. Now if you’ll all excuse me, I have to go come up a solid war strategy to convince my kids it’s bedtime tonight when they don’t believe me. It may involve hitting them over the head with a tennis racket or drugging their juice, but I’ll never tell. When you fight Mother Nature, anything goes.
