I got an e-mail from a friend today asking, “How do you have time to do everything you’re doing?”
The short answer is, I don’t.
Another friend e-mailed me that since she started working again (at home, but in her office), her youngest daughter complains that she’s always busy.
She is!
How do we do everything we want to do as well as everything we need to do? It’s hard to choose when there are so many things out there to do.
In my case, I feel like there are some basic facts of life that come first: I am homeschooling my daughter, and it’s the best educational choice we’ve made for her. This is something that takes up a lot of my time, and I’m glad to do it. Another basic fact of my life is that I firmly believe that children need a home life. And that my husband and I need to stay committed to creating that for them. In our case, it was pretty easy, just looking at salaries, who was going to do that work during the day! Writer vs. software engineer. Hm.
So I am committed to being home with our kids. This summer our son is home from school, too, and we’re being home together a lot. We’re also going out and doing stuff a lot. And yes, our wonderful babysitter Vanessa has saved my life by giving me six hours of her week each week when I don’t have to answer that dreaded word: “Mo-o-o-o-o-o-o-m-e-e-e-e!!!!”
My husband is committed to being home with the kids as much as he can. He used to work at home; now he works in the same county at least. He’s there to put them to bed nearly every single night of the year. He reads to them, does computer and building projects with them. Today he took them to the Computer History Museum over the hill, and shopping for unusual Asian food (a family passion). I spent the afternoon at a board meeting for the choral group I sing in and help run, Ariose Singers. And now I’m writing. Answering e-mail. Trying to figure out why all my e-mail f0lders have disappeared. Scheduling things. Writing. Answering e-mail. Getting a new password for my blog site because for some reason I can’t log in. Wondering why my e-mail isn’t working. Etc.
My goal as a stay-at-home, work-at-home, homeschooling mom is to be able to focus on whatever I’m doing. I’ve gotten much better at simply forgetting that I have a deadline when I’m with my kids, and simply forgetting that I have kids when I’m working. My kids laugh at me when I answer “Mm-hm.” “Mommy,” my son says, “Mm-hm means ‘I’m not listening to you’.”
“No buddy,” I tell him. “Mm-hm means you shouldn’t be coming into my office and asking me questions.”
One of the things that homeschoolers say about the point of homeschooling is that kids learn about life as homeschoolers. Their parents don’t have a separate life from homeschooling; it’s all life. And grown-ups do, in fact, work. And they have passions. And the people around them have to deal with their work and their passions. I would have been shocked if either of my children had no sense of pitch – they’ve been hearing music through their bones since before they were born. When they were babies, I sang with them strapped to my body. Now they get to hear me rehearse, over and over, the same difficult lines. This is education in music, life and commitment.
Sometimes I realize that I’ve scheduled too much, and so another thing I’ve had to learn is the technique of calling immediate downtime. Oh, boy, we’ve done way too much this week, haven’t we? I’ll say to the kids. Let’s stay home today and just do stuff we want to do.
At the beginning of the summer we made a big poster of all the things we wanted to do this summer. It included the biggies like Legoland and learning to write in cursive. And it has a whole section titled, “I’m bored!” One morning recently when I was taking my shower, my six-year-old came in, breaking the rules, to tell me that she wanted to watch a movie. “No movies,” I yelled from the shower. “But what can I do?” she said. “Go to the poster and choose something from the “I’m bored” section,” I said.
A few minutes later she came back. I had just gotten out of the shower. “I want to bake,” she said decisively. “Bake what?” I said. “Under “I’m bored” it says “baking” and I want to bake,” she told me.
Under our informal rules of homeschooling this was totally fine. We go with our passions. So bake we did. She found a recipe for vanilla cupcakes and we made them. I had other things to do, but I always have other things to do. This was the point of making our “I’m bored” list. No matter how little kids might think they have to do, they truly have endless things to do.
Yes, I am too busy. But I’m also making myself turn on a dime and just stop. Just leave the blog unfinished, the article unedited, the thought incomplete. And that’s why being busy is not…currently…driving me insane.
