There are liabilities that come along with being…well, me. One of them is the tendency to approach all of life formulaically, knowing that there is one right answer in every circumstance. That approach worked well for much of my life, when achievement was marked by multiple choices and test scores and rankings, and I was a professional test-taker, a.k.a. student, and a good one at that.

Real life is so not about scores. It is not summed up in A, B, C, or D, and it does not congratulate my ability to make the highest grade at the expense of getting out from behind a desk.

I’ve been driving myself crazy, see. Reading all these books and blogs and trying to draft a single airtight plan that will cover our new life, with its feedings and changings and sleepings. Meanwhile, The Kid farts nonstop in his Pack ‘n Play sleeper (he is so going to burn me for that in his next blog entry) and hiccups and purses his lips cutely and, generally, does not give one tiny rat’s ass about how many books I’ve read because he is not–despite his diminutive but growing size–so easily summarized. I called The Sis the other day to ask her about schedules and clusters and other topics I knew nothing about a few weeks ago, and her answer? You just have to let go of all that. Accept that, especially these first few weeks (and, oh yeah, all of life from now on), life is controlled chaos. When he’s hungry, he needs to eat. When he’s tired, he will sleep. And he will not consult a book before doing so.

So I went back to the blog I was reading but skipped ahead to the comments section, and what did I find but a bunch of lost, confused moms like myself who just want to be directed…and validated. Life’s central quest, now directed in the vein of child-rearing, but no less potent: Tell me I’m doing okay. And I realized that for all my searching for the one answer, I would do well to remind myself of the Indigo Girls’ thought on the matter, that “the less I seek my source for some definitive…the closer I am to fine.” Because we, you and me and he, were created a little too intricately to be defined so simply. And while the world also is too gloriously complex to be summed up by one answer for every question, that fact itself points to the greater truth: one source for those answers. A source that is carefully un-obvious and yet glaringly visible, not just in the order but in the mystery, which only too often is dressed up as chaos.