Chronos vs Kairos

A book I read about 4th trimester talked about how western culture overemphasizes Yang energy - schedules, productivity, success, business.

And new motherhood is time of Yin, that few modern women have gotten to practice. Life with a newborn is intuitive and slow and unpredictable and hard to measure. A lot of it happens at night.

This reminds me too of the concept of Chronos "clock time" vs Kairos "God's growth time."

So much of pregnancy and the NICU stay happens with doctors, who use Chronos.
Weeks of gestation, centimeters dilated, ounces gained or lost per day, feedings every 3 hours, bilirubin count in the blood, milliliters of milk pumped, % of oxygen in the breathing tube.

I had to unlearn all this my first week of motherhood, and learn to do it the Kairos way. (I may not have figured it out so fast if I hadn't had these terms to help.)

The first big step was to abandon the aggressive pumping regimen. To decide to not work that hard toward a goal of exclusive breastfeeding, that it was more important that I have time to sleep and to hold my baby.

The next step was to move away from the "feed me change me" app.
Your baby should be pooping 4 times a day and peeing 6 and eating at least every 4 hours but not more than every 90 mins, and each meal should be 1-3 oz, and sleeping 16-20. How can you keep track of it all, when days are nights and is today Tuesday? Is it still 2019?

I'm not sure, but you find the baby's rhythm. We just know now, he's overdue for a poop. He'll probably wake up hungry in about 30 mins. He was awake for awhile, the next sleep may be long. That sleep was long, he may eat more this time.

The baby has no sense of time, but he as a cycle that makes sense. So his parents find their new cycle, working and resting in turns. It doesn't work to say, I'll nap 11-1 every day, you nap 3-5, and we'll divide the night exactly in half at 2:45 am. But we just alternate on and off, feed him, feed ourselves, take a break.

It's tiring but it works.
We've found our way to Kairos time pretty fast and it helps.

I feel like one of those rocket videos where the big huge booster pieces are falling off, but it keeps soaring. There goes the NICU monitors, there goes the pumping plan, we don't need to write down every pee and every ounce and every minute at the breast.