Hanging On To Me Time For Dear Life!
That sound. That wonderful sound. What sound? Why the wheels of the bus going round and round, of course.
The school bus has marked the passage of time since I brought my daughter home from the hospital. As a new mom of a newborn, I was either sleepily learning the moves of motherhood or I was a frantic person working in tiny increments of time while the baby catnapped. I literally didn’t have time to look at the clock. Instead I measured the passage of days by the comings and goings of the school bus, trash truck, recycling truck, FedEx van, and our neighbor’s Snap-on Tool truck.
When one, two, then all three children boarded the school bus 2 plus years ago, I did a little happy dance at the end of my driveway. After years and years of only having preschool time to run errands and some years I had to make do without any time to myself, I was free to do what I wanted to do. Freedom!
Well, it was a short-lived freedom as it turned out.
According to a recent White House report on Women in America in families where both husband and wife work, women have less free time per day than men. What camp does your household fall in to? As a work-at-home mom, I do the lion's share of cleaning, ferrying kids to doctors' appointments, and volunteering at the children's schools. So much for freedom, right? The report, prepared for the White House Council on Women and Girls by the Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau, and Bureau of Labor Statistics, among other groups, notes that working husbands are more likely to take time for leisure activities and sleeping, while women spend more time taking caring of household chores and looking after family members.
My Mondays were immediately booked with volunteering at my children's elementary school. Faced with the happy prospect of not having to find a babysitter I eagerly signed up to volunteer for my son’s classroom Read-to-Me time. I glanced at the sign-up sheet...actually I think I signed up online...and made a beeline past once-a-month, twice-a-month, to the weekly sign-up column. How hard could it be to volunteer once a week? No problem, right?
Wrong. I loved volunteering, but found that a weekly commitment is a toughie especially when I needed to shop for a new dishwasher or stay home for the repairman or visit the dentist or drive a half hour to get blood work done at a lab with the slowest staff possible. Oh and did I mention that I signed up for any number of online sites where I could write/review/post to my heart’s content. Yep, not a well-thought out plan.
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