I really want this blog to be a positive space but there’s so much crappy stuff going on right now.
Last week we went to another funeral. Another friend’s Dad. Another soul taken far to soon - and so quickly - by cancer. We are all in our mid-to-late 30s, and our parents in their mid-to-late 60s. We didn’t expect so many of us to have lost a parent at this age.
And Mum has had a little (big) blip on the health landscape too. One which requires a large, scary operation and a long recovery. She is a little scared but putting on a brave face and just keen to get it done. I don’t think either of us have fully grasped the recovery implications. It’s just one step at a time.
And in amongst all of this, perhaps because of this, the parenting journey is such a grind. I’m back at work, which is a huge adjustment and a commitment I’m not used to. The terrible twos are morphing into even worse threes on the tantrum stakes, as is the norm. The sickness wagon has been hanging around for about three weeks now (c’mon, winter is long behind us). And the sleep Gods, who are generally pretty good to us, are dealing out a rough string of average nights. Everything’s just a little harder to deal with when you’re sleep deprived.
When people ask how I cope I ask how can you not? Just one foot in front of the other. And I spend a lot of time reminding myself how lucky we are to have a lovely home, good jobs, healthy kids etc. But these last few weeks I’ve taken a break from gratitude. Everything’s just a bit shit and I’d trade the material stuff and the jobs in an instant. And I’m tempted to trade the kids when they’re being brats and throwing a wobbly! But then they do something gorgeous, of course.
So I’ve had my little self indulgence, and now it’s time to play the gratitude game again, hug my kids and my husband tight and put one foot in front of the other.
Oh, we're all soooo busy, aren't we? It's not a new conversation, nor is that fact that most of us choose the level of commitment we have. That discussion has been done to death and will continue as we get busier and busier.
But what I want to ask is, do you know where your time goes? Do you ever chat to someone you haven't seen for a while and say "gee, I don't know what we've been doing, we've just been bus-eee"?
(We'll get to that in a minute, but can we pause to laugh at the ridiculousness of stock image captions? This one is called "Casual Business Woman Typing On Laptop Whilst In Bed", but the real hoot comes if you check out this one: "Dedicated adorable mother starting an active day". It's useful lesson in how working mothers CAN have it all...)
Just sitting down and trying to catalogue the last seven days is tricky. We had an extra child last weekend as her parents had gone away for two nights, so that led to a hectic weekend. There was a lot of tending to baby Audrey while the twins and their sleepover friend followed Dad, Nan and Pa around the garden. A new sandpit was built but I can't claim any credit for that. I did make a cake and prune some lavender but I'm not sure what else sucked up Saturday.
Sunday we went to brunch at the fabulous Goonoo Goonoo Station. Tamworth is so lucky to have such a great venue in town and we went with Mum and two international visitors who were staying with her. Don't ask me what happened after brunch. We arrived home and the sandpit was finished so I think the kids passed a lot of time in there. Maybe it was actually Sunday that I did the pruning. So what the hell did I do on Saturday?
Is it a challenge of the memory or do we genuinely have large gaps in our day, voids that are caused by pottering and social media.
Today I played with the kids for a bit until their Nanny arrived. Then I came down to do a bit of work at my little bookkeeping-slash-real-estate-mogul job, helped mum with a few jobs around town, returned to do a bit more work, ate my lunch, picked up my car (which I'd left at mum's), [fill large gap here], inspected a leaking toilet, called a plumber, stuffed around looking at emails and sat down to write.
The main inspiration of this post is that it's been a while. And instead of the usual "sorry guys, I've just been bus-eee", I decided to put a bit more thought into it. On a macro level I can totally account for the busy-ness (kick-started a side hustle, returned to my comms job 2 days a week, went to my sister-in-laws wedding in Sydney) but isn't it hard to narrow that down to the day-to-day?
Do you have to bill your time at work? I am so good at it. But imagine if you had to bill your time at home. What would be your go-to for those voids? "Unproductive"? "Filing"? "Team meetings"?
I'm probably all of the above. Because social media is totally "filing", right?
