Seeing Balance

You know what they say about the weather in Michigan?
If you don't like it, wait ten minutes.

Yesterday it was 75 degrees and sunny here. We went to the playground, took an indoor hiatus long enough to go to a birthday party, came home and put on swim shirts, shorts, hats and sunscreen and filled up the kiddie pool in the backyard to play sailboats and torpedoes. Then we drew sidewalk chalk all over the back deck. I only wish I'd taken a photo of my two plus their little friend, on their hands and knees with sponges, scrubbing the deck. They were actually having a grand time erasing their chalk drawing to start over again, but it certainly looked like Cinderella, the Swimwear Edition. Then we played baseball for a while. In between it all, we swung on the horsey tire swing, slid down the slide 857 times, and played chase. Finally, we had to take showers and a play-doh break indoors before going back outside for a cook-out with friends. It was a glorious springtime day, boding delicious things for summer.

Today it was 53 and raining.

So we made indoor fun instead -- which has its own charms too.

As soon as I snapped the photo above, Son asked, "Are you going to send that to Daddy, so that he can see what we're doing too?" So, of course, I did.

Then we ate brownies for dinner at 5:00.

We followed it up with piles of fresh fruit and veggies with dip at 6:30, but the kids thought of that as a "snack," so I'm pretty sure I still am going to get credit for doing the coolest mom thing EVER while Daddy was away by letting them eat brownies for dinner.

Here's what I have learned in the last three days of flying solo with my two: having children is waaaaay more fun if you don't try to do anything else at all except BE while you are with them. I didn't grade anything, or email anything, or read anything, or blog, or take any work phone calls, while we were together. I didn't try to do any laundry (I'd done it all on Thursday, while Daddy was still in town) or scrub any bathrooms or clean any fishtanks. My house cleaning was limited to daily dishes and a quick mop of the kitchen floor tonight, plus enforcing our family standard "you have to clean up your puzzle messes before you can pull out the play doh." Beyond that, I played, went swimming, took them out to lunch, played some more, read loads of stories, and snuggled them on the couch to watch "Max and Ruby." Discipline was extremely easy (presumably because they had as much attention from me as they could possibly want and therefore had little to throw a tantrum about).

There are many ways in which I don't envy full-time stay-at-home mothers. I don't think I have the stamina to do what they do. You may think that I've just done it for the last three days. But in our house, the last three days were basically like vacation, not like daily routine -- and were I doing the at-home daily routine with children 24/7, I think I would become certifiable due to lack of adult interaction and an overwhelming urge to burn Mount Laundry.

But I will say this: as someone who is used to trying to squeeze and snatch a spare moment here and a stray half-hour there to get work done, I found it blissfully freeing to choose to focus on just one thing and forget about everything else. I know it can be emotionally draining to be with children all the time. But it can also be emotionally exhausting to be pulled in two directions all the time. And it sure was nice to tread around in the greener grass on the other side of the fence for a few days.

Delightful, actually.

I have made a vow to myself to remember this and to try to be better about keeping my two halves more separate. That might sound counter-intuitive, bifurcated, more likely to result in a feeling of being constantly torn. But here is what I think for me instead: my job-work is never done. And because it is never done, I need to find a better way to compartmentalize it so that my child-work can be more joyful.

Unlike a 9-5 job (or an 8-8 job, or whatever), teaching takes as much time as you give it. If you have four hours to grade that stack of papers, it will take four hours. If you only have two-and-a-half, you will get them done in that time. But--and this is the key--the work is largely work that can (and often should) be done outside of an office environment. Students send you emails at all hours and on the weekends, and they expect you to respond within 24 hours. (Actually, they secretly hope that you are also awake at 3am and awaiting the "ding" of their email's arrival, so that you will answer it immediately, but if you are good at your job, you have told them on day 1 in no uncertain terms not to hold their breaths on that score.) Your office is typically a tiny windowless room in a building built in 1964, furnished with green Steelcase gems of the same era. The air quality is bad, the view (of cinderblocks) uninspiring, and the resources next to useless (apart from high-speed internet, you have no archives, no fridge, no library, and no comfy reading chair there). So you work outside of the office. And, at all times, you could do your work almost any time of day or night.

Which means that at almost every time of day or night, you feel as if you OUGHT to be working instead of doing something else.

This is particularly the case for researching and publishing. The article that you just finished? It may be "done," but there will be readers' comments and revisions, communications, and more reading, rewrites and proofs to go over, before it's actually published. The process of researching, writing, and publishing is so drawn-out that there is no sense that anything is ever really finished. By the time something emerges in print, it's completely anti-climactic because it's been so long out of your hands and in production that you've moved on to the next project, which is currently still in process. Colleagues photocopy you reviews of books that sound fascinating and that you can't wait to read. Conferences get announced that are right up your alley -- and so you have to put together a paper to propose for them. And so on. The job is a process more than it is a series of end products, and so, it always feels as if there is more to do.

For me, this often translates into a nagging feeling that I "have to do just one more thing" before I can really play with my children. Or a guilt that I am not doing right by my students if I defer returning their papers for one more class period because I spent too much time in the swimming pool on Saturday.

But what I reminded myself this weekend is: THIS IS THE WEEKEND. I'm not supposed to have to work every single day. I'm supposed to have a day or two here or there when I get to play. And so I did.

It is a difficult balance I have to find. I do need to juggle evenings and occasional weekends of work because I have made the choice to spend two week days at home with my little ones rather than put them into fulltime daycare. The flexibility of my schedule, and the fact that the majority of my work is not bound to particular places (with the obvious exception of classroom teaching and meetings), means I can do that. But it also means that I have to find another fifteen hours per week in which to work.

Even so, after realizing tonight with a shock, as I was reading to the kids, that I am not exhausted by this weekend of managing them alone, but instead rejuvenated by it, it occurs to me that surely I can come up with wiser ways to get the rest of my work done without sacrificing the joyful half of my brain when I am actually with Son and Daughter.

I need to create a moratorium zone: work here, family there, and never the twain shall meet.

In all practicality, I will of course have to have some weekends where Husband takes the kids to the pool so I can finish some grading. But I really think that if I manage my evenings better, my days can be better too. I will have to come back from La La Land and actually do laundry and errands with my children in tow. I will have to scrub things, or pay bills. I will have to referee squabbles. But if a part of me isn't thinking, "just stop shouting at each other so Mommy can answer a few more emails," I think perhaps I will be more patient, and better able to help them sort it out.

Also, I will be happier.

And as everyone knows: when Mama is happy, it's so much easier for everyone to be happy.