Mathematics of Motherhood

I was talking tonight with a friend, herself a math PhD student, about the ins and outs of life with two babies, and I explained that a mothers live doesn’t work like everyone else’s: the mathematics of motherhood are completely different. Take, for instance, going to a restaurant. I asked the waitress for a table for six and two babies and she chose a booth for us that really only seats five. Now, you’d think that maybe two babies would take up one whole seat, or maybe two seats to be generous. Not quite. With strollers and a diaper bag, and car seats, and wiggle room, they can easily crowd the rest of us out of the way. And, of course, anything within arms distance has to be kept clear of tall glasses of water, sharp objects, and potential catapult material like corned beef and/or cabbage. So, in the end, they really got half the booth to themselves. We switched to a bigger table when the drinks came out. When you figure in spit-up space, six and two babies is really more like twelve. (And in our defense, we tipped as such.)

Having twins only complicates the matter, because most people only really remember about a seventh grade math level. They all think that having twins means work X 2. The truth is, it’s work squared. Which helps explain why my diaper bag is the size of a carry-on. Diaper bag x 2 + (Bottles + formula) x 2 + spare clothes x 2 = space cubed. It doesn’t matter what order of operation you solve the equation in – I need a chiropractor.

Time, of course, is completely different. I make my shopping lists at 3 am. And I don’t just calculate how long it takes me to get to town, run errands, and get home, but I have to plan it such that if they sleep in the car, they’re not up till eleven that night. Not too early, not too late – this is a science on par with orbital physics. It also explains why I’m still excited that the characters of “Lost” just found the other half of the plane, and The Black Dahlia is a new release for me. Windows Vista does not exist in my world. VH1 Classic channel, on the other hand, gives me a comfortable feeling of constancy. The altered course of time can make walking a fussy baby feel like hours, although only yesterday he couldn’t even sit up on his own and tomorrow he’ll be walking all over the house. Other people think about their sleep in terms of hours, preferably seven or eight, while I think about it as shifts, usually not more than three at a time. (NO, they’re not sleeping through the night, like everyone told me they would. Liars, all of them.) Daylight savings time certainly didn’t affect my world, since the boys follow their own incomprehensible fluctuating sleep chart that is completely independent of atomically engineered populist time zones. I feel like the entire state of Illinois.

This is all by way of saying that the time elapsed since my last post is really only a fortnight by my calculation. If you think of a month not as thirty days, but as meals that I eat sitting down, this new post is right on schedule. I’ll see you again at oh-eight-hundred, fantasy-time.