Do Busy Moms Have Time?

After reading Washington Post staff writer Brigid Schulte’s time starvation manifesto, “The Test of Time: A busy working mother tries to figure out where all her time is going,” I couldn’t resist but to reach out to her to share the power of slow. I felt an affinity for her and her struggles. It seemed like the right thing to do.

She sent a lovely response, agreeing to meet for coffee if I was every in the area. It just so happened I would be. So we sat down for a chat while I was in Washington, DC in mid-March. In our one-hour discussion, we covered a lot of ground, which she wrote about in today’s Washington Post.

We talked at length about our lives as working mothers, the constant external pressure to keep it altogether, and our intense need to do this despite how taxing it can be. Her children are roughly the same age as mine (primary school); like me, she works in a deadline-driven environment, often from her home office; and, like many people, she struggles with the clock.

That is where our lives diverge.

Somewhere along the line, I consciously decided to disengage from clock combat. I began to look at time as a resource I could work with, not against. It was a subtle, yet profound paradigm shift that leaves me feeling calmer when life gets messy.

With two kids life is often chaotic and loud and odiferous. Just yesterday my son dropped a strawberry on my favorite pants, staining them a lovely red hue. We learned that berries really can stain. But we learned something else, too.

Boundaries matter.

This mind-shift of time-as-friend-not-foe happened because I saw how my children, back when they were age one and three, lived in a timeless state. To them the clock meant nothing. So why did it mean so much to me? What would happen if, for a moment, I stepped out of time altogether and walked more slowly to the car, to the grocery store, to the laundry room? What would occur if I took the risk of slow-poking it to work, thanking the fourteen-wheeler for giving cause to ease off the gas for the ten-minute ride?

Wonders occurred. My life occurred. I occurred.

Sitting in the trendy metro-area coffee shop with my new Post pal, I delighted in Brigid’s company as she admitted she delved into the procrastination chapter of The Power of Slow first. Life can be so overwhelming! Where to start! Working toward deadlines seems to help. It must as she manages to meet her timelines like everyone else. But along with the workaday routine, she is accompanied by a deep feeling of dread. Tell me really, she said to University of MD leisure studies professor John P. Robinson, where does my time go?

She even went on the Dr. Phil show to address this same issue.

It got me to thinking.

Where are we spending most of our time? If I were to calculate how much time I spent in my car, for instance, while in the US for just that week, I would say a good deal of our time is spent inside our vehicles. How can we cut down our personal traffic? Is it feasible?

Telecommuting arrangements are one way to navigate the time continuum. For moms who work without pay (read: full-time parenting), how can we carve out moments of time for ourselves? In a past essay, entitled “Minute Snatchers ~ How to Be a Writing Parent” I called time carving  minute-snatching. I’d snatch a few minutes during naptime to write. In fact, I wrote three books that way. It was fulfilling because it gave me a sense of control, something many moms struggle to regain in their lives dictated by so many external demands.

Having blocks of time seems like a luxury, yet it is possible. It really is about task management.

My kids, for instance, are home for a two-week Easter break right now. Like boomerangs that hover low to the ground, then high in the sky, they double sling-shot their way through the day. Sometimes, they make arrangements with their friends; at other times they are sitting on my lap, asking what they can do. Just when the pain point of their boredom gets unbearable, they come up with an idea. I call it skating on the fringe of creativity. They need those unstructured days to feel the timelessness of youth. Then there are moments in which they are in structured play, such as a two-day riding camp. It is about blending both to find the optimum experience.

Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we don’t.

Think of it this way: when you fill a tablespoon with water, what takes longer? Running the water at full speed or raising the faucet handle just a tad to fill it once without spilling?

The other day my son ranted about how his jacket wouldn’t zip up as he hurridly struggled with the zipper.

“Sometimes slow is faster,” I said in my best mommy voice. He smirked as I showed him what I meant.

Today he proudly showed me he could zip it himself.

“Look, Mom!” he beamed. “There really is power in slow!”

Why yes, honey, I’d say there really is.

6 Comments

  1. Suzanne/Late Bloomer Bride

    April 1, 2010 at 6:25 pm

    Great post, Christine! I especially love “skating on the fringe of creativity.” After having read your book, I also am working on being more focused. When I am driving, I am driving. When I am watching a movie with my hsuband at night, I am allowing myself to get lost in the story. And, when I’m working, such as writing a document for a client, I only do that (all the while trying really hard not to also worry about what e-mails are raining down from cyberheaven, as I dare to close the Outlook program during my writing stint). You are so right. Boundaries matter.

    1. powerofslow

      powerofslow

      April 1, 2010 at 7:19 pm

      Thanks so much! Whenever I have things raining down on me all at once, I get totally frazzled. Slam that Outlook, girl. It’s all about the email smackdown! 🙂

  2. Amy

    April 2, 2010 at 2:51 am

    Christine, I just ordered the Power of Slow and I can hardly wait for it to get here! I’m a SAHM of three boys and I am frantically running at top speed almost nonstop. I know I need to slow down, calm down, and breathe but it’s easier said than done. I belong to a women’s personal renewal group (PRG) based on Renee Trudeau’s book The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal (www.reneetrudeau.com). We meet once a month to discuss a chapter from the book and do the exercises. After those sessions, I always feel calm and balanced and I can incorporate those lessons into my life for a while. But as life whizzes by, the chaos ensues and I forget how to get back to that balance. I’m hoping that I can incorporate the Power of Slow into the equation and really make some life changes.

  3. Matt

    April 2, 2010 at 1:37 pm

    Hi Christine, I really enjoyed your article. I’m an academic psychologist involved in research in positive psychology and time in particular. There’s a great academic book by a the highly respected psychologist Philip Zimbardo about the flexibilty of time and exploring if you are past, future or present focused. It’s called The Time Paradox. Thanks again for the article.

    1. powerofslow

      powerofslow

      April 2, 2010 at 1:41 pm

      Matt ~ thanks so much for your comment! How funny the world is as I am reading Philip’s book just now. I am thinking of interviewing him for a post on the topic. It is fascinating to get a psychologist’s view on time. What are you working on at present?

  4. Matt

    April 2, 2010 at 4:18 pm

    At the moment we’re looking into the effect of routine and savouring on the perception of time. It’s thought that time seems to go more slowly for children as they are more likely to be experiencing something new; whilst as we get older and live a life of routines, leading to less new experiences, our perception of time appears to speed up. In conjunction with this we’re asking participants to savour various everyday activities and comparing their perceptions of time to people involved in the same activities without savouring.

Leave a Reply to powerofslow Cancel

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox

Join other followers: