Two days in to week two of the spring term, and I'm noticing an awful lot of failure going round. Failure here I define as not getting the day's to-do lists done.
My to-do list each weekday is so simple: be up and presentable before 10am; teach my children; hit the laundry and the dishes; eat dinner together. There's also the big, underlying to-do of don't compromise this home life stuff for anything no matter how enticing.
It seemed easy those weeks in January when I was just up from being sick for three months, when I was in a stage of grief where the daily routine was the refuge, when my resolution to stay home was fresh. Are those the reasons why it was easier to get it all done, then?
But I am still not sick (flu shot for the win!). I am still finding that being at home doing the usual humdrum things is a loud and clear source of intense bliss.
I'm slipping on my goal to do nothing and stay home, admittedly. I set up a playdate to learn to brew homemade ginger ale, a project the youngest boy and myself have been itching to try for ages, with a friend I'd like to see more often. I asked one of the potters in my collective to show me how to use the kiln in our studio, after the youngest girl excitedly anticipated out loud what kind of pottery I might make for her birthday this year. I let the too-often melancholy middle boy add one after another game session to the tail end of his week, until Wednesday and Thursday and Friday all had something shoved in there in the hopes of keeping the boy happily busy.
I would argue with myself: these things don't mess up our days because I schedule them wisely. I chose only activities that matched my big life goals. I placed those activities at the ends of weekends when teaching children is off the to-do list, as extra hours attached to events we have to do, in places that are simple and fast to get to. (The collective's pottery studio is in our basement, so technically that is staying home, right?)
Is it really that I need to literally not do anything else every day to have time to do dishes, laundry, schoolwork, and supper together? I dearly hope not, and worrying about it all week, I've had Bread and Roses stuck in my head, a melodious hearts starve as well as bodies competing with the zen master's admonition that there is as much enlightenment available in your house as there is on the side of the road, in a cave or at the monastery.
Maybe I had eaten up my margin with these events, placed them right in the flex spaces we needed to keep on track when inevitably we had to deal with doctor's appointments, grocery shopping trips, or relatives dropping by.
Trouble is, I'm not willing to give up art, friendship, family, or launching my boys into the world of their peers, nor can I stop seeing doctors and avoid grocery trips entirely.
So I looked long and hard at my track record. I have been, since the start of the year, keeping a detailed daily journal, a bullet journal, so I was able to see where my time went every day.
It turned out, I didn't need to compare January with March. I could see the problem in the last three days.
I had pulled an all-nighter babysitting the kiln, yes, but I would have been able to manage the day after without breakfast and lunch taking an hour and a half each if I'd done the dishes between sprints to the basement to peer in to the fire. Instead I chased down BuzzFeed lists and let dinner harden on our pots and pans. The children had been at exes' houses the weekend before. Why hadn't I done extra laundry then, instead of having to send the teen away from algebra today to the laundromat for clean pants to wear to his robotics meeting tonight? I'd been on Pinterest all weekend, that's why.
In December, my husband had a laptop he let us use when it was a personal computing emergency. I spent very little time online because of the competition for the device. January and February saw an amazing and accidental influx of computery wealth. Now, in March, we have a cheap little laptop dedicated to the children's schoolwork, another big desktop box on which the teen can work his robotics magic, and a refurbed iMac that is my very own device, as well as husband's laptop.
And I am getting nothing done.
This is a lesson I have written about before. There are more hours in the day when one doesn't have internet access at home, so many more that I once decided I would just not, that I would rely on the coffeehouse on the corner for my occasional indulgence in world wide web. But I forgot it. Or didn't believe it. And I had to learn it again, by this sight of myself doing the things backwards, chopping away at the water.
So it is with a great and heavy sense of my own stupidity that I embark on an internet diet. I'm not sure the form it will take. Every other day, maybe, to start. I'll allow offline myself activities like editing photos and prepping blog posts. We'll see if I get more done.
And maybe instead of bemoaning my failure to live intentionally, I'll count this as a bullet journaling win.
I will live on purpose. I will.
My to-do list each weekday is so simple: be up and presentable before 10am; teach my children; hit the laundry and the dishes; eat dinner together. There's also the big, underlying to-do of don't compromise this home life stuff for anything no matter how enticing.
It seemed easy those weeks in January when I was just up from being sick for three months, when I was in a stage of grief where the daily routine was the refuge, when my resolution to stay home was fresh. Are those the reasons why it was easier to get it all done, then?
But I am still not sick (flu shot for the win!). I am still finding that being at home doing the usual humdrum things is a loud and clear source of intense bliss.
I'm slipping on my goal to do nothing and stay home, admittedly. I set up a playdate to learn to brew homemade ginger ale, a project the youngest boy and myself have been itching to try for ages, with a friend I'd like to see more often. I asked one of the potters in my collective to show me how to use the kiln in our studio, after the youngest girl excitedly anticipated out loud what kind of pottery I might make for her birthday this year. I let the too-often melancholy middle boy add one after another game session to the tail end of his week, until Wednesday and Thursday and Friday all had something shoved in there in the hopes of keeping the boy happily busy.
I would argue with myself: these things don't mess up our days because I schedule them wisely. I chose only activities that matched my big life goals. I placed those activities at the ends of weekends when teaching children is off the to-do list, as extra hours attached to events we have to do, in places that are simple and fast to get to. (The collective's pottery studio is in our basement, so technically that is staying home, right?)
Is it really that I need to literally not do anything else every day to have time to do dishes, laundry, schoolwork, and supper together? I dearly hope not, and worrying about it all week, I've had Bread and Roses stuck in my head, a melodious hearts starve as well as bodies competing with the zen master's admonition that there is as much enlightenment available in your house as there is on the side of the road, in a cave or at the monastery.
Maybe I had eaten up my margin with these events, placed them right in the flex spaces we needed to keep on track when inevitably we had to deal with doctor's appointments, grocery shopping trips, or relatives dropping by.
Trouble is, I'm not willing to give up art, friendship, family, or launching my boys into the world of their peers, nor can I stop seeing doctors and avoid grocery trips entirely.
So I looked long and hard at my track record. I have been, since the start of the year, keeping a detailed daily journal, a bullet journal, so I was able to see where my time went every day.
It turned out, I didn't need to compare January with March. I could see the problem in the last three days.
I had pulled an all-nighter babysitting the kiln, yes, but I would have been able to manage the day after without breakfast and lunch taking an hour and a half each if I'd done the dishes between sprints to the basement to peer in to the fire. Instead I chased down BuzzFeed lists and let dinner harden on our pots and pans. The children had been at exes' houses the weekend before. Why hadn't I done extra laundry then, instead of having to send the teen away from algebra today to the laundromat for clean pants to wear to his robotics meeting tonight? I'd been on Pinterest all weekend, that's why.
In December, my husband had a laptop he let us use when it was a personal computing emergency. I spent very little time online because of the competition for the device. January and February saw an amazing and accidental influx of computery wealth. Now, in March, we have a cheap little laptop dedicated to the children's schoolwork, another big desktop box on which the teen can work his robotics magic, and a refurbed iMac that is my very own device, as well as husband's laptop.
And I am getting nothing done.
This is a lesson I have written about before. There are more hours in the day when one doesn't have internet access at home, so many more that I once decided I would just not, that I would rely on the coffeehouse on the corner for my occasional indulgence in world wide web. But I forgot it. Or didn't believe it. And I had to learn it again, by this sight of myself doing the things backwards, chopping away at the water.
So it is with a great and heavy sense of my own stupidity that I embark on an internet diet. I'm not sure the form it will take. Every other day, maybe, to start. I'll allow offline myself activities like editing photos and prepping blog posts. We'll see if I get more done.
And maybe instead of bemoaning my failure to live intentionally, I'll count this as a bullet journaling win.
I will live on purpose. I will.