Years ago, I came across the daily schedule for the Missionaries of Charity, which Philip Kosloski outlines here. The sisters in Mother Teresa’s famous order spent each day in the following pattern:
4:30-5:00 Rise and get cleaned up
5:00-6:30 Prayers and Mass
6:30-8:00 Breakfast and cleanup
8:00-12:30 Work for the poor
12:30-2:30 Lunch and rest
2:30-3:00 Spiritual reading and meditation
3:00-3:15 Tea break
3:15-4:30 Adoration
4:30-7:30 Work for the poor
7:30-9:00 Dinner and clean up
9:00-9:45 Night prayers
9:45 Bedtime
When I first read this, I was uncomprehending. How could women who had become so legendary for self-sacrificing service to the poorest of the poor spend so little time caring for the indigent? A full hour-and-a-half for breakfast? 12:30 to 4:30 is nothing but a giant siesta and prayer time! What is with that? I was perplexed and filed it away to revisit some day.
Similarly, I recoiled at the thought of “the first forty days,” a traditional practice of keeping mothers in and around bed for more than a month following birth. How could they stand it? What was the point?
Now that I’ve lived a little more life and fallen into the snares of trying to live a healthy family life in a post-modern, materialist age, I think I’m beginning to understand the routine. For example, the hour-and-a-half for breakfast? That appears to be standard. Sure, you can dole out something on-the-go in a pinch, but if everyone in the family is in the house of a morning, dag gummit if it doesn’t take an entire 90 minutes to make, consume, and clean up the breakfast experience. And it’s not just being home. Camping? 90 minutes for breakfast on the electric skillet and over the campfire, dishes washed off in a container filled with water from the spigot.
You can rail against the inefficiency, find a more expedient method of nutrition, or recognize that there are many forces and experiences involved in the daily taking of meals. You can accept the length of time that should be allotted for family breakfast.
Likewise, most people, especially people caring for others or engaged in intense physical or mental work, benefit immensely from resetting the day through quiet time, a cat nap, a walk outside, something to demarcate the first half of the day from the second with a refreshing reprieve.
Following the gossipy debacle of the Mormon mother of eight who competed in a beauty pageant 10 days after giving birth, there was an article in which her husband stated his wife sometimes can’t get out of bed for days at a time, brought so low by exhaustion is she. This claim led some to speculate that consuming unpasteurized milk had sickened her; I don’t think it’s that. Not knowing the woman in question personally but based on the observation of reality, there is nothing surprising about exhaustion, if it is true. Many fit and disciplined women could leap from their bed at a week post-partum, squeeze into a pair of pleather pants and strut around for a few days. Granted, they might not look worthy of a beauty pageant doing it, but it’s within the realm of physical possibility. Most of those women would then be knocked down within weeks or months, forced to take the rest they delayed.
There is something similar to observe in the more people you meet who “work 120 hours a week” (They don’t. Laura Vanderkam has some good insight on the realistic hours that intensive careers require.) The longer you are acquainted with such people, the more you realize that many people who work manically also are crushed by exhaustion at other times of the year and lie fallow, utterly spent, recovering from taxing themselves too much. Emergencies and military campaigns sometimes require people to push themselves beyond their ordinary limits but he who lives daily life in a state of emergency will live a short and unhappy life.
All of this was crystalized in my mind reading Greg McKeown’s “Effortless.” He succinctly notes that one should not do more in a day than one can recover from in that day; one should not do more in a week than one can recover from in that week. Revolutionary! Many people can live life at a sprint for a while: having babies, growing a business, moving house frequently, homeschooling older children, exercising intensively. All those activities at the same time, however, will deplete you. You are not special; you are not different. You will get tired, sometimes just plain tired out.
Revisiting the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity enlightened me. I had foolishly been sucked into the working mother debates. How can women both have an elite career and all the children she cares to have? She can’t. Unless she makes enough money to employ a good nanny who will effectively keep house in addition to childcare that is personal, consistent, and one-on-one. That is the model that works.
For women in the middle, not seemingly able or perhaps unwilling to give up professional aspirations but also not in a field that commands a significant salary or—imagine this—she wants to be with her children in the daily moments of life, not squeezing in “quality time” in between work trips, daily life is untenable. If most days are teetering toward too much activity, too little rest, life will crush her. So many mothers are isolated, angry, raging against an unjust system, plagued by physical distress and chronic disease when really what we have is a fundamental overscheduling problem.
There is an ancient Christian tradition (probably also just an ancient tradition) of viewing each day as a life: you are born in the morning, you live out all the seasons of life through the hours that pass in a single day and lay down to the sleep of death in the evening. A well-ordered life may have days or weeks of intensity that require foregoing adequate rest and recovery, but that cannot be the majority of our days unless we desire disaster.
When mothers speak flippantly of “mom brain” when they can’t remember their own name or phone number, what they are experiencing is not some run-of-the-mill lapse of mental capacity that we should expect to see in anyone who has given birth but a profound neglect of our embodied selves. It is possible to sleep after having babies. Many people do it! Find them and learn their ways. Dr. Marc Weissbluth’s “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child” is an excellent cheat sheet on the subject.
Many mothers continue to create and to work after having children. The ones who are not debilitated by age 45 have found a way to structure their days to accommodate the needs of body and soul. When thinking about our lives and chronic fatigue and dissatisfaction, a good place to start is with the basic question: Does our daily schedule realistically fit into a single day?
