Re-Run! I’ve had change and time and Wayne Dyer and motherhood on my mind lately and so I thought this was fitting to share with you again.
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Time is something I have always been conscious of. Not just the hour of the day, but also the years of my life. My life has always been one big check-list of major accomplishments I would like to achieve by a particular year. I alluded to this when I talked about my unwillingness to veer from the path I had set for myself in university. This goal-setting fetish didn’t start in university – this goes way back to the eighth grade with my first record of a chronological check-list embedded in my journal. I had just had my thick, black hair that had hung halfway down my back chopped to just under my chin which was shorter than I had wanted. According to my teen magazine, my hair was expected to grow half an inch each month – so I charted its anticipated growth in my journal to figure out how many months it would take for my hair to reach the desired length. The summer before tenth grade I babysat two unruly boys and I spent many a summer evening bent over my journal charting how long it would take me to earn a decent amount of money so that I could be “financially independent”. Later that year my parents told me that I was too young to have a boyfriend but that when I turned 18 I would be free to do as I pleased in this matter. So I made a chain of coloured construction paper links; each link signified one month until I reached my 18th birthday. I think I started with over 24 links and every month on the 12th day, I would remove one link thus marking the time until my significant birthday.
I am also hung up over daylight time, particularly as we change seasons. My husband expects that every evening as we approach the winter or summer solstices I will announce the difference in the time of sunset from one day to the next. He expects this because I have done this to him EVERY YEAR since we’ve been married!
Finally, I am conscious of time in terms of punctuality. Maybe because I’m a Taurus, or maybe just because I’m wired this way, I believe that if you arrive somewhere on time you are actually 5 minutes late! Being married to someone who is perpetually late has challenged me to be a little flexible about my personal concept of punctuality (which is a nice way of saying having a husband who is always late for everything often drives me crazy!) BUT there was something else significant that happened four years ago that completely threw me for a loop and still causes my head to spin at times…
I became a MOM. And oh my goodness, I have rarely been on time for anything since then (without a major struggle or some serious luck). Packing up to leave the house, whether it’s a short jaunt or a long trip, can take an excruciating amount of time and even then I will inevitably forget the one thing that I actually will end up needing. Just when I think I’m ready to head out the door and make my appointment on time, someone needs a diaper change or a snack or isn’t finished playing with the Tupperware that is littered all over the kitchen floor. In this one area of my life that I liked to control as much as possible through my checklist-making and my written records, I was utterly and miserably failing. The lack of control over my time became one of my biggest challenges and, in all honesty, continues to be my biggest complaint. “I don’t have any control over my own time!!!” I say that. Often.
For example, I had planned to write and post this blog this morning. This was the plan I made yesterday. I would wake up before the kids did, creep down to my studio so as not to awaken the light sleepers, and write until the first “Mommy!” was heard, hopefully an hour and a half later. Unfortunately, I heard the first “Mommy!” when I sat up in bed at 6:45 am and reached for the glass of water I keep on my bedside table. In that moment, I knew this post would not be written until late tonight (it’s 10:45 pm right now, past my bedtime!) and it was a conscious effort to not that let that bother me. But it did.
We all have constraints on our time, but I was always able to manage so much when I had a certain amount of control over my own time in my pre-maternal era. This, however, is a situation that isn’t going to change much in the very near future. However, as renowned author and speaker Dr.Wayne Dyer says, “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change,” and so I am going to change the way I look at this shift in control of my time and see if I can psychologically get a grip, so to speak, on a new version of this concept. Considering it is still Monday and I am posting this tonight, then technically I have achieved my blogging goal for the day. It may not be at the time I originally planned but I can go to bed feeling satisfied and not cranky…much better!
And you know, there are other times of the day when I do have some control over what I do with my time and perhaps I need to look at this a little more closely and make sure I am using these minutes wisely. How wonderful that this leads right into the Try-This Tuesday task for this week. But of course, THAT I will blog about tomorrow – it says so right on tomorrow’s list!
