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Monday, June 28, 2004
aah, motherhood
I guess motherhood and hedonism just don't mix. All day I've planned that I would take the afternoon off today -- the house is passably clean, and the laundry's caught up, and it's summer vacation. LT reads like a whiz and can write intelligible paragraphs and he knows about the water cycle and the life cycle and the food chain and money and something about the American Revolution and pioneer days and Native Americans, and he can add and subtract multiply and divide and tell time, and nobody taught him any of that stuff but me; HE gets a break during the summer, so I'm entitled to one too, right? At least one, an hour on the porch swing with a novel and a tall ice-rattling bottle of ice water? Except it never happens; there's just too much to do. It's not that I'm some workaholic or that I'm house-proud -- far from it, I'm afraid; I do manage to find myself sitting in front of this machine plenty of times when I thought I was folding laundry or what have you. But as far as just scheduling some down time for myself, something always comes up. This afternoon I thought I'd made it -- ballet and swimming lessons were over; the clothes were clean, dry, and folded; dishwasher emptied; kids fed and playing quietly in their rooms. I was about to get my diet Coke out of the fridge when I noticed that the counter could really use scrubbing. And the table too. And I may as well put away the laundry... and put back the couch cushions C messed up... and load the dishwasher. OK, then that was all done, and I picked up my book and noticed that the floor needed sweeping. Swept the floor. And then I remembered... I'm supposed to mail that letter for T today in TODAY's mail (we live in town which means we have no home delivery/pickup of mail; we have to go to the post office). So now I have to get the kids out of their quiet play (never mind, they just came out on their own and said they were hungry, could I fix them a snack?), get them all shod and combed and washed, and load us all into the car, and drive to the post office and back, and who knows if that golden moment of solitude and freedom will present itself again before next year... and it'll be time to get dinner going when we get back anyway.
sigh.
It's not that I'm not grateful. This is a life that I have chosen for myself, and I love it, and wouldn't trade it for any of the alternatives (after all, even if I did want to, I think I'd find that a "working mother" has to do all this stuff anyway, with the added frustration of dealing with coworkers from 8-5 and with children being raised by someone else's ideas the rest of the time). And granted, it is so. so. so much easier now than it was, say, three years ago, when my children were much less capable of doing things for themselves. But sometimes it just seems like it will never end until I'm faced with the rest of my life stretching ahead of me, childless -- at which point, of course, when I have the porch swing and the book and the solitude available full-time, I'll wonder why they ever looked so appealing in the first place.
