The Magic of Structure
I open Google Sheets once a day. I didn’t think this would be true when I decided to be a stay-at-home wife (now mother) two years ago. But the colorful triangle of Google Drive has become a constant companion, in whose presence I feel a little more sane and put together.
When I was in my many corporate jobs, I ended up organizing so many internal processes and physical closets. My own mother would not describe me as detail-oriented (she knows I’m more of a visionary), but when it comes to efficiency in the workplace, I became pretty “Type A.” During a summer camp job in college, I created two overly-detailed manuals for my role; I created a database and scanned old, physical files into a digital library at another job; I’ve restructured many a company Google Drive or file explorer; and I’ve spent countless hours reorganizing overflowing cabinets and closets at various jobs. Creating order from chaos has marked my professional career.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that I would approach my life as a stay-at-home mom in a similar fashion.
I have many ways of organizing and reorganizing my life in this season, mostly in the form of Google Sheets. A weekly meals sheet, a grocery pricing breakdown, a monthly calendar, a monthly budget sheet, separate Google Calendars for family events, bills, and my postpartum journey, and to catch anything else, a physical notebook scribbled with everything from countless lists to sermon notes to recipes.
For the last year or so, I’ve thrown myself into the structuring of my life.
First, as a new, skittish mother struggling with postpartum anxiety, it was tracking every single bowel movement my daughter had (and what type), how many naps she took and for how long, how long she nursed (on each side), and other meticulous baby-tracking information. My eyelids heavy with sleep but my mind heavier with sleep training practices and frantic google searches regarding what’s normal for a newborn, I kept track of it all for about 6 months.
Then Amelia proved to be a thriving, happy little thing, and I felt less strained to write everything down.
So I turned my structure-imposing habits onto our meals. I started meal planning weekly, with a weekly budget and grocery plan, something I’d only been passively doing through a postpartum haze. With the clarity of my old self slowly returning, I signed up for every grocery store membership in our area, to find the best prices and coupons. I would spend hours each week, narrowing down the best bang for our bucks. Which is cheaper this week, frozen beef from Aldi or Walmart? Who still takes manufacturers coupons? Is Ibotta worth it? Does it make more sense to bulk buy this from Costco, or let it eat at the budget weekly?
The lists went on with my meticulous planning, and I found solace in the structure. I wrote our meals out on a whiteboard in our kitchen, drawing leaves in the margins in the fall, flowers in the spring. I’m still proud of this work; it was paying off well and gave me a sense of control and constancy in those troublesome yet magical newborn-to-baby days. We were staying within budget, we were organized, and I was feeling fulfilled and whole, though still raw and healing.
But the feeling became fleeting as soon as it felt too easy, and I wanted to keep using the mental strength that was slowly but surely returning.
Once I got good at one method, I wanted to try a new one. I wanted to lower the budget by $10 and see if we could make it until the next grocery trip a week later. I wanted to make more things from scratch - bread, pie crust, biscuits, english muffins - so I could keep them off the grocery list. I wanted to pick a day of the week where I don’t plan for any meals, and challenge myself to only cook with what’s left in the kitchen - the forgotten cans in the back of the cabinet, the last sprinkle of shredded cheese in the fridge, the random leftovers in the freezer. (I’ll admit, I didn’t do this one often. Those meals were too rough.)
When we bought a home, I shifted from heavily focusing on our meals to creating a weekly homemaking schedule to keep it clean and running smoothly. I gave each day a specific set of tasks, and spent an exorbitant amount of time typing it out on a Google Sheet and making it pretty and then printing it out and taping it to our fridge. I edited it and reprinted it countless times, learning that cleaning the bathrooms on Mondays was a crummy start to the week and I needed more than one day dedicated to laundry.
Each hour of our days is accounted for. From a 7:30am wake up, to a 10pm bedtime, there’s breakfast, walks, playtime, morning chores, lunch, nap times, afternoon chores, part-time work, dinner prep, dinner, baby bath, playtime, baby bedtime, kitchen cleaning, relaxing, bedtime. On Mondays, my morning and afternoon chores look different than on Thursdays. Friday is grocery day, Saturday is admin day, Wednesday is our “day out.”
Structure, planning, Google Sheets, pricing research, couponing, new recipes, scratch cooking, cleaning, more structure, more planning. I’ve clung to the feelings of control as my strength returned and motherhood has come more naturally.
It feels like a lot when I list it out so rapidly, and maybe it is. But I’ve discovered that I’m using a part of my brain that may otherwise lay dormant, a part that I quite enjoy exercising. I feel creative and creatively stretched in my little spreadsheets. Though structure is not fail-safe, and prayer remains my chief source of calm, having a set time for that prayer and a few lists to pray through, I’m especially thankful for structure.
Being a stay at home mom comes with its cons, that plenty of women either warned me about or bemoaned as the reason they could never do it. It can be lonely and repetitive. Babies grow fast, but the days are monotonous, broken only by firsts - a laugh, or a word, or a step. It seemed early on, in the monotony, that I would have all this time and freedom to nurture my own creativity, challenge myself intellectually, stretch my arms and legs literally. But my energy isn’t infinite, and so in those early postpartum days, I would end up sitting on the floor with my baby, watching her grow slowly and quickly, and wondering where the time has gone, even while I was blinking it away.
I’ve thrown myself into the structuring, the planning, the meticulous note-taking. I’ve found so many small and big joys in the midst of this way of living out my days. It’s almost as if the days don’t slip away so quickly. The structure holds in itself a bit of magic, whether for sustaining my tasks and keeping life moving, or for beautifully allowing the tasks to go unfinished in favor of a small hand holding up a book to be read or a giddy husband showing off his latest painting project or a slow sunrise in a quiet kitchen demanding to be felt in silence, all completely outside a spreadsheets columns.
And even if the days do slip by too fast, I can look back at my notes and remember, “I saved $3 on eggs that week! That was the first time Amelia tried tuna! Tucker loved that dish, I need to make it again soon!”
There’s so much life lived in my structure, so much stretching and pulling, whether by tiny hands on my apron or through rising dough on my counter. What could it be, but the sovereignty of Almighty God, that holds and sustains me, lists and all.
““Commit your work to the Lord,
And your plans will be established.”
“The heart of a man plans his way,
But the Lord establishes his steps.” ”
