Hindsight

In my previous post I talked about how I've been going with my kids to various professionals to see if we can get to the bottom of some recent behavioural concerns. One of those professionals asked me what, if anything, was happening at home which might be unsettling for the kids.

"Hmmm," says I, "Well, nothing I can really think of. Life is just the same as usual, same routines, same everything." In fact I felt quite proud that my kids' life was going about as per normal.. that they were still fed and clothed and loved.

Life with triplets is totally bound by routines - a concept I've previously blogged about. Every single person you talk to will tell you that without a routine, your life is a total goner. DH and I subscribed to this theory very early on (before the kids even came home from hospital) and we've kept it going even today. I suspect some triplet parents abandon the routines once their kids get to school age, but in our household we've seen no need to mess with a good thing. The routine has of course changed with time - naptimes have disappeared, playtime has gotten longer, homework time has been added in - but still, we very much function via a routine of events.

So - my kids know exactly what to do when they come home from school. They know which days are bath days (although extras often get added in), they know their chores for the day, they know what is expected of them in the evenings. This way, their life (and consequently my life) are ordered. Not always organised, but ordered - it just tends to make things flow better. So in my answer earlier, I wasn't wrong. Things basically ARE the same for us... except...suddenly I realised that in the past few months, nothing has been the same.

I wasn't home for a month, and so my kids routine was disrupted for four very long weeks. I came home, and I'll be honest in saying I've been a bit of an emotional minefield since then. Then DS moved into his own room (for the first time in 8 years, my kids were not in the same room) and that disrupted his routine. Their school is under construction, so their school days became rearranged, and rearranged again, to accommodate the changes in the buildings. Then came a whole bunch of evening school events, which meant that for several weeks my kids were over tired, had late nights, and again fell out of their routine. Then we decided to sort out the mess of our house, which meant that the house itself was (and remains) in a state of disarray. Now we're heading into school holidays, which means that yet again their carefully crafted routine will fall by the wayside.

So I revised my answer.

"Actually," I said, "It's been MONTHS since anything was normal in my house."

And suddenly, I got it. I understood why none of us (except maybe DH, who could stand in the eye of a storm and be perfectly calm) aren't feeling ourselves. I understood why my kids have asked (for 3 days in a row now) to have an afternoon nap, when they've not napped since they were 4. It just all sort of made sense. We've managed to keep a veneer of a routine, but the heart and soul of it just all fell apart. We think we're in a routine because all the surface activities have remained the same, but in reality it's been anything but routine these past few months.

Hindsight is a beautiful thing.