Isn't it about... TIME?

So the other day I was reading the Washington Post Magazine (as always, with a grain of salt) and I came across this story about busy moms and their time, subtitled: "Working mothers say they're busy, on the clock every second of the day. But is it true?" (You can see why I read it.)

The gist of it is a Post writer (a mother)'s response to a U of Maryland sociologist's claim that "Women have time. Women have at least 30 hours of leisure every week. In fact, women have more leisure now than they did in the 1960s, even though more women are working outside the home." Hm. Okay so I'm not a typical DC-area "working mom" who spends 40+ hours in the office while my children are reared by day care and/or live-in nannies, coming home to see them on the weekend or after 7:00 in the evening where we eat frozen pizza in the gigantic kitchen of our McMansion, the financing of which is clearly necessitated by our dual-income family. I work 10 hours a week at most and we raise our below-school-age kids ourselves, but I'm still BUSY! Where oh where is this elusive 30 HOURS of "leisure" time???

Well, in case you don't have that much "leisure time" to read the whole article (though you can, here), I will summarize that this sociologist challenged the writer/mother who came to him to log every minute of every day for seven days. One year later, she had done it. Oh, he came up with the leisure time, all right - 28 hours of it, in her case. He did it by classifying such activities as exercise, answering emails, watching movies with the kids, visiting a sick friend with the kids, talking to a friend about her leisure time on the cellphone to report this story while taking her son's bike to the shop for repairs with the kids, as leisure. He even tried to categorize the two hours she spent broken down in a median strip on the freeway waiting for a tow truck as "leisure" time. So basically, we don't have all these extra hours of wasted time with which to do as we please - it's just how we look at the time we do have? I don't know - I was kind of annoyed by this guy and more than a little smug when the writer casually threw in there how she had a hard time getting a hold of him for a few months while he was off attending beer and nudist festivals.

Anyway, one thing I DID enjoy about the story was the perspective of our rushed society as presented by the other [cough, more intelligent] professionals that were interviewed. Here's the best explanation I found:

I just felt so busy. That sense of being overwhelmed, explained cultural sociologist Edson Rodriguez, 27, (!!!) who teaches at the University of Southern California, is a status symbol these days. Everybody who aspires to be anybody is busy. Gone are the days when the goal of the wealthy and elite was to laze around doing nothing. These days, even billionaires are on tight schedules. "We derive status from feeling overwhelmed," Rodriguez says. "So if I don't feel busy today, there's something wrong." (italics from Krista)

This guy has it right. Not only do we constantly insist that our lives are so exhaustingly busy and crazy and stressful, we secretly enjoy it! He believes the reason lies behind the massive feeling of accomplishment we get from "surviving" such a hectic schedule. Reflecting on this I realized I am definitely one of this herd. REALLY my life is not that hard. My kids do not have any activities or events to keep track of, we pretty much stay home all winter, my kitchen is so small I can mop it while standing in one place (I count this as a time-saving blessing!), and sometimes when it's hard to get up in the morning, I just curl up on the couch with a blanket while my kids run amok around me. (There. I said it.) But when people ask the inevitable rhetorical question, "How's it going?" I reflexively roll my eyes and say something to the extent of, "Oh, so CRAZY! But good." Really? Heaven help me when my kids hit their teens.

So, if you've made it this far (CONGRATULATIONS and I'm sure there are news reporters out there who would like to hear about where you found all this leisure time) you are my witness that I am vowing to no longer fall in with the stress-addicted population that is especially so prevalent in this area. I'm going to be more realistic and feel thankful that I can stretch out on the couch and read a novel (gasp!) while my kids are napping. And that I don't have to spend 40 hours a week in an office cubicle while someone else watches my girls inventing cute stories and dressing up in Halloween costumes and dancing and fixes them peanut butter sandwiches and cleans up spilled grape juice. My life is pretty darn fabulous and I am not going to muck it up by pretending it's too crazy for me to handle.

And I suppose that is the closest thing to a New Year's resolution you will hear from me.

(Sorry there's nothing really here about my girls. Maybe I can dig up a picture or two. Here ya go...)