Murphy's Law Moved In: Parenting When Nothing Goes to Plan

Hey, friends, parenthood comes with so many wild things: sleep deprivation, clogged milk ducts, the daycare settling-in period, parent-teacher conferences, worry lines, and happy tears. All of it comes in phases. Some of it sticks around for a while, some of it is over quickly.

One seriously wild thing that definitely sticks around for many, many years with kids is that nothing can be planned anymore. Unpredictability just rules the house. Or, to put it another way, Murphy's Law (the old saying that anything that can go wrong, will) moves into your family life as a permanent houseguest.

My latest example: I wanted to take my eight-year-old daughter to Munich for a weekend. She's our third child, and sometimes I feel like she slips through the cracks a little when it comes to attention. So I had surprised her with a mom-daughter weekend: just the two of us on the train to Munich, where two of my siblings live and we could have crashed with them.

When I went to book the train tickets, I nearly fell over. The SUPER SAVER FARE for my daughter and me came to almost 300 euros. I guess that's because I was booking pretty last-minute and I don't have a BahnCard (the German rail discount card). I thought long and hard about whether to book it, but since the rest of the weekend was going to be fairly cheap, I talked myself into it. And I skipped the extra charge for a cancellation option, with the words: “We've been healthy for so long, surely nobody is going to get sick this week of all weeks.”

Of course it did. The night before we were supposed to leave, my eight-year-old and the baby of the family both came down with a stomach bug. We parents changed sheets nonstop, held heads over bowls, and wiped up p*ke (above, you can see a photo of our littlest patient…). A train ride a few hours later was unthinkable, especially since my own stomach was queasy and I came down with a fever soon after. Which meant: the weekend and the money, gone.

As if the universe were out to get me…

I have a hard time not taking this kind of thing personally. It feels like the universe is laughing in my face and saying, “Ha, you got your hopes up again, didn't you? Let's see how that works out for you!” It gets even worse when you open Instagram: everybody else is out doing fun things, and you're lying around miserable while everything sucks.

In our 14 years of parenthood, we've had loads of moments like this. The yoga class I'd booked had to be skipped because a kid had a fever. Dinner with friends got canceled because the babysitter just never showed up. The hair appointment didn't happen because the school called with a “please pick up.” Birthday parties had to be rescheduled, outings too, and on and on and on…

After something like that, I have a real talent for sinking into self-pity (even though I know none of it is truly, truly terrible). Over time, though, I've learned that it drags me all the way down, and then it's really hard to climb back out of that hole. So I give myself a few minutes to mourn what I'd planned. Usually I sit down alone in the bathroom, have one good cry, and scream into a towel. It's incredibly freeing. Then I flip my brain back on and say, “None of this is life-threatening, and we can't change it anyway.” I “force” myself to be practical, and it works pretty well.

This crazy unpredictability…

And still, this wild unpredictability of things, or rather the wild flexibility we parents have to come up with again and again, is honestly unbelievable. In a matter of seconds, we have to toss our plans out the window, make decisions, and replan. We have to adjust to new situations, make room for change, and just accept that life with kids is like this: exciting, exhausting, wonderful, and only somewhat predictable…

P.S.: After the two little ones and me, the two big kids and my husband got sick too. So a virus that swept through the entire family… Jackpot, basically 🙂