Motherhood, animal-centered design & time.

A little over a year ago, I wrote the following entry with the hopes of publishing it before welcoming my son Franco into this world, but I didn’t get around to it.

July 2, 2023

This post is more personal. I wanted to leave a record of a hunch I have so that in a few months I can check if I was onto something.

As of today, I am 38 weeks and 6 days pregnant—essentially, “any day now." I am teetering between excitement about becoming a mom, longing to meet my baby, mourning no longer being a non-mom, nervousness for the future, and immense gratitude for having the opportunity to become a mom.

Most importantly, I am convinced that the years I have spent working with dogs and trying to understand their experiences have better prepared me to understand my non-verbal newborn son.

Quite a claim, right? Or maybe not?

I don’t know. Yet despite my current feelings of excitement and uncertainty, I feel an underlying sense of ease regarding the “trying to figure your baby out” part. I might be overconfident, and I suspect parents reading this post will smile and think, “Oh, but she can’t even fathom what she is in for.”

I still disagree.

Back to the present.

Franco recently turned 1, and despite his 20 or so words he is still mostly non-verbaI. Although the last year has presented many new challenges, understanding what Franco is trying to communicate and meeting his needs has, for the most part, never been one of them. So, I either have an exceptionally communicative baby, or as I presumed, my experience designing for and with animals has sharpened my ability to interpret non-verbal communication. I am 99.9% sure its the later, because from what I’ve read in parenting books and have observed in other babies, all babies are good communicators. It’s us parents and animal partners that sometimes struggle to attune to their signals and style.

Many factors influence our ability to interpret what non-verbal animals (including my son) are communicating, and I plan to write more posts about a few of them. I’m starting with time, not in the physical sense, but in the way we use it to structure our days. For animals and babies, time is not dictated by a clock, a cultural norm, or an upcoming activity. From what I’ve observed it is dictated by states, feelings, and the movement of the sun. I believe time is one of the most influential factors because it is somewhat arbitrary and insidious, ruling our adult lives on levels we are not even aware of.

For babies, there is no dinner time; there is hunger. There is no playtime; there is being. There is no bath time; there is interacting in and with water. They have neither the conception of when things should start nor end; they just are. Yet we adults have preconceived notions not only of when things should start and end but also of how long they should last and how often they should happen.

Although we each have our routines, in a general sense, dinner probably happens in the evening, possibly sometime soon before we go to sleep, and last around 15-40 minutes depending how fast or slow you eat or who you eat with. So when our babies don’t feel like eating at 6:30pm or take an hour to eat and play/throw their food, we are left wondering what is going on. The same happens with our companion animals. For example, our dogs might be used to being fed at a regular time every day, and may even come and alert us when that time is approaching, but maybe they would rather eat at a different time, or like my dog Mila eat a little bit when she’s served and finish her food later in the day. I would guess that most adults don’t actually eat when we are hungry; we eat when we are supposed to. So, if our babies or dogs don’t eat on cue we start to doubt either their health or our ability to meet their needs. But the thing is, we might not even realize that this sense of doubt, annoyance, concern or frustration stems from our underlying expectations of things happening on cue because that is how adults live.

If we could put the clock away in both a literal and figurative sense, we would enter baby/animal time more fluidly and free up a significant amount of capacity to meet them where they are. We would be better able to leave time by the wayside and instead focus on context and circumstance. What is happening now, what happened a little bit ago or a while ago? How are these factors impacting me, my baby or my companion animal? These are the questions we should be asking ourselves - not why is is taking so long for my dog or baby to - fill in the blank. We should be allowing them to reveal to us their routines which are important, but in a way in which they are built on a sequence of activities not a sequence of activities in adult time.

This mode switch is a concept Laura Gutman, and Argentine author, psychotherapist, and family therapist known for her work in the fields of parenting, emotional health, and women's issues describes as yin and yang time. Where yin time is nurturing, introspective, and restful, while yang time is characterized by action, productivity, and outward engagement. Babies and animals for the most part live in yin time. Us adults, if not intentional can mostly reside in yang time.

So …. I am elated to report that this hunch has turned out to be true. Being an animal centered designer has not only made me feel like a better designer for humans, but has made me more confident as a first time mom. It’s pretty amazing and it gets me excited to return to work and continue to try and show the world the depth and opportunity this field has - not only as a design discipline, but as a way to connect with who we are.

The images in this post are original art by Bea Muller and can be found for purchase here.