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 Dad on a LarkA blog by Rand Richards Cooper, on parenting baby Larkin
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January 23, 2008
Chaos Theory
 Twice a year, we visit the World's Most Amazing Children's Yard Sale, a three-day extravaganza, one town over from us, run by a woman who started it small and grew it to epic proportions. Molly and I have bought some of Larkin's favorite outfits there, as well as Baby Freaky, the doll who is her inseparable companion. For $50 we haul away more swag than you'd believe. But the real reason I go is the high I get from seeing how insanely well-organized the yard sale is. The woman — I don't even know her name — has her system down. Everything is in perfect order, with shoes up front, toys in the garage, and clothes on different racks, proceeding by age. Color-coded tags denote different sellers. When you make your purchase, the tags get filed in the right place, all the paperwork is sorted and totaled and accounted for and filed away. Exact change is always available. There are even bags. I find it breathtaking to watch this organizational acumen in action. It makes me swoon with envy, in fact with something like lust. Because these days my life, our life, is totally out of control. I am a living, breathing illustration of the scientific principle that once you have a baby, everything goes nuts. Or, as Larkin would say, "Messy, icky!" OK, so I was never the most organized person to begin with. I've been known to run about the house shouting, "Where are my car keys?," only to discover them in my hand. And my office has always been a mess. But there used to be a method to that mess. Yes, things piled up, but I knew, more or less, what was in the piles. If I needed to find the car registration renewal I'd put aside a week before, or the article I'd torn out of the paper, I could home in on it. And every few months I'd go on a massive organizing binge where I'd get to the bottom of everything and start all over again. But then came Larkin, and life tumbled over into total chaos. There just isn't enough time to keep up. Those piles of stuff in my office, I go digging in them and I uncover all these ... surprises. Like three bills shoved inside a magazine contained in a shopping bag buried beneath a sack of stocking-stuffers I got for Christmas. Ouch. Eventually you develop these "don't go there" places. You don't know exactly what's in there, just that it's bad. Molly, for her part, is by nature a tidy person, and she used to know where everything was far better than I did. No longer. "That's the old me," she'll say, meaning, before Larkin. Just now she walked in and started rummaging through the closet at the back of my study. It is snowing outside, and she wants to go out with Larkin. "Don't we have a box of ski stuff somewhere?" I just laughed. Yes, I said, somewhere we do. My sister and I — she has a career and three kids under 6 — sometimes exchange a personal fantasy in which we call time-out and stop the world for three days. In novels and movies, this fantasy is usually the chance to do something subversive, thrilling, or illicit, like stealing the Mona Lisa, or repairing to a Mediterranean island for some Swept Away-like romance. Me, I would clean my office. What a sad state of affairs when the bureaucratic becomes erotic, and getting organized is your great fantasy. But I get so tired of waking up day after day feeling behind the eight-ball. One typical Saturday recently, I faced a morning of writing and editing, then an afternoon going-away party I was co-throwing for a friend, plus some household repairs (a gutter coming unattached directly over our power line) that met my sole criterion for doing anything around the house, including bill-paying — namely, that not doing it poses a clear and immediate danger to our family. Molly, meanwhile, had mountains of laundry to do, papers to read and grade, and so on. And Larkin had woken up in a hideous mood. As she flopped around whining in her crib, I went downstairs to get her breakfast ready ... only to find that Bert, during the night, had peed and pooped on the kitchen floor, and thrown up too, just for good measure ... and I was stepping in it. "There's going to be a slight delay," I called up to Molly through gritted teeth. It was all I could do to keep myself from grabbing one of the dishes in the sink (still dirty from the night before) and hurling it against the wall. Moments like that bring up the question of how, as a working parent, you can find some area of stillness and focus in your life — and what happens if you don't. I find it's a pretty big challenge. The first thing I try to do is remind myself that for now at least, my fantasy of being like the yard-sale woman is just that, a fantasy. That dream of getting my life under control, I have to let it go. I just have to live with the mess; in fact, the mess is my life. Thinking this way makes it a lot easier to laugh — and laughing reminds you you're not a robot, but a human being. And every once in a while the universe delivers a small gift of time. Like our snow day today. Molly's a teacher, and for her a snow day is as close as she can get to that stop-time fantasy. We dress Larkin in her lilac-colored snowsuit and head outside. In the backyard we build a snowman and serenade it with a chorus of "Frosty." Then we flop down to make snow angels. Lying flat on my back, I look up at the sky, exhale, and relax, taking inspiration from the snowflakes and their lovely, immaculate laziness. Editor's Note:   Rand Richards Cooper is the travel correspondent for Bon Appétit, and is author of a novel, The Last to Go, and a collection of stories, Big as Life.
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