How I’m learning to love routine & change the look on my face

As much as we should learn to love and embrace change, there’s something to be said for the benefits of a healthy routine, especially where the challenges of parenting are concerned

According to a friend, I have the most spectacular RBF (Resting Bitch Face) he’s ever seen. He hadn’t come across the term until I introduced him to it one day at work. He’d noticed a particular expression – or rather, absence of expression – on my face and said he didn’t think a face could do that. “It’s like your soul had left your body. Like you’re dead inside.”

It was a particularly boring meeting that had brought on the RBF that day. Something else that causes my soul to leave my body is routine. We’re not friends, routine and I. Give me change and a challenge over sameness any day. To energise me, offer me new items on the menu, fresh challenges during my workday, and a different route to work.

Experts tell us routine is good for children. It provides a sense of security and teaches them organisation and time management. I can attest to this: I established a routine for Kids 1 to 3 as soon as I could. While I breastfed on demand, bath and sleep time were non-negotiables. They quickly got used to it, and amazingly, they thrived on it.

I didn’t thrill to it as much as Kids 1 to 3. I could depend on nap time, so to some extent, it worked in my favour. But it didn’t take long for the monotony that, for me, goes hand-in-hand with routine, to bore me silly.

We’re way past the days of feeds every two, three or four hours, the regimented nap times, and the endlessly repeated nursery rhymes, but that’s not to say that our lives aren’t steeped in routine now that the kids are older.

Fun fact: Kid 2 has worked out that, to date, I’ve made school lunches approximately 2470 times. Triple that number, give or take, if you want to know how many school lunches I’ve made so far.

That’s a whole lot of marmite sarmies.

Have you caught the conundrum here? I’m an anti-routine parent. I know it’s good for my kids, but I find it difficult to find the joy in it.

If I look at it impartially, routine isn’t all bad. There’s a couple in my neighbourhood who take a walk together every day at the same time. They follow a similar route each time. They’re always smiling and chatting. They’re always holding hands.

I love spotting them, even for a few seconds, as I whizz by on my way home from fetching Kids 2 and 3 from school. They reassure me that routine doesn’t have to be about steeling myself and enduring whatever I’m doing. Watching them makes me think I could even aspire to a routine just like that.

So my challenge to myself this month is to try to look at routine a little differently. To grit my teeth, squint my eyes, and try to embrace the rhythm and the good in what I’ve always viewed as monotony.

I’ll start with three things that never fail to bring on my RBF:

1. My kids go to good schools that provide numerous extra-mural activities that allow them to grow into well-rounded individuals. A great reason to embrace the routine of waking up at stupid o’clock on a Saturday to get a child to hockey practice.
2. I get to depend on a salary from a good, secure job. There’s motivation to choose to go with the flow while I’m driving through morning rush hour traffic.
3. I have three healthy kids who like to enjoy a good meal at school every day, which is reason enough to try to accept the bleary-eyed sandwich-making ritual at 5.30am every day.

I don’t believe routine and I will ever be besties, but I do think that sometimes, choosing to view something a little differently can change the way we feel about them. And maybe by doing so, my RBF won’t make its appearance quite as often as it does now.