Shift

You can't make a day longer than it is. You just can't. You must fit into 24 hours all that you want to get done. No wiggle room, no arguments!

And there never seem to be enough hours in the day. So you do what comes to the top of the priority list, and the rest has to wait. Maybe it will rise to the top of the priority list the next day. Maybe not. Maybe you'll stay up late to fit stuff in. In that case you are dumping sleep to the bottom of the priority list. Which ultimately catches up with you and throws things off balance. Which makes the other things on the priority list harder to accomplish.

Some things are easier to push down on the list than others. For example, it's hard to ignore hunger for very long. You can, of course, for a while. But eventually if you don't act on it, you will feel tired, lazy, irritable, whatever. And that, of course, effects everything else. Other things can be ignored for a longer period of time, or even forever. You can go without doing laundry for a while. You can put off paying that bill for a week or more. You can put off making some phone calls for weeks. And there are loads of things on the "get to at some point" list.

This morning, my husband commented that he misses doing things together with me. He has said this in the past. Without question, our relationship has changed a lot since we decided to have kids. It has changed in more ways that I could ever list here. Obvious changes are things like, he goes to work every day, I am home with the children. He lives a dual life, like every working person. My work is my home life, they are one. His work day starts and ends. Mine is continuous. He stays up late, I go to bed early. He often falls asleep on the couch downstairs, I sleep with the kids. Our lives have become parallel, joining in the evenings for our dual-parenting hours before the kids go to bed. We overlap for an hour or so in the evening, during which we exercise, then spend a few minutes watching a movie. Then I'm off to bed, and it starts all over again. On the weekends, hubby and I have implemented morning breaks for ourselves, which was our answer to some very uncomfortable Saturdays (See Peaceful Saturdays? Not so much.) The tension has been brought down, and our Saturday mornings run smoothly. But hubby and I spend more time apart.

Part of this division was perpetuated by me. I fully take responsibility for it. Until recently, I was simply unwilling to be away from my children. I didn't want someone else to watch them while I did something else. Anything else. I am an attachment mom, and if I feel my kids need me, I am there. Now don't get me wrong, I need time away from them. I am aware of that. Before DD started preschool I was so in need of time away from being a parent that I was able to help push her through the discomfort of starting school. That need was so great that I had no choice but to put my needs first, although I didn't want to. But I was still reluctant to leave them for any other reason. And of course DS was only a baby. It wasn't until fairly recently that I started to feel comfortable leaving them to do other things.

So now I can leave them. Briefly. So I am coming out of the 5 1/2 year period of stubborn attachment. I'm finally allowing myself some much needed freedom. Not much! But some. The biggest need, the most pushy item on the priority list under "alone time" is ME. Simply doing stuff for myself, by myself. And much of that has been finding my happy place, which is what this blog is all about. Taking much better care of me. I have neglected myself terribly. By following what I thought was the right path, I've ended up so depleted I just hated myself. So now I'm working hard to change that. And it's taking most of my focus, outside of my "work."

But now the priorities must shift again. I have pushed hubby, and his needs for a relationship with his life partner, aside for long enough. It is one of those things that can be put off, but really should not be. It's important. For me, for him, for them. And it needs to be more than the once a month or month and a half that we get out to dinner. And we have to fit it in to the 24 hour a day that we are given. If we can find an hour for each of us to have a break from our responsibilities each weekend morning, we can find one hour to spend together, too. Or instead.

I'm off to email our babysitters.