Precious Time
“Hi mom!” peep the shining faces as they pop around the screen then duck away giggling. Try writing. Just try it. With half your sleepy brain on right-fit words and half on “Can I has more more gam cackah?”
Every morning…
Well. Most mornings…
Okay, some mornings, I wake up at 5:15 to manufacture space for myself.
In my imaginings, I use this time to write in quiet, thoughtful solitude.
In reality, I’m so tired that until my coffee is made, my eyes are not fully open.
In reality, I often spend this time deleting junk email or reading newsletters from my gym.
In reality, my youngest two still wake up sub-6 about half the time, so by the time my coffee is made and my eyes start to open, there’s squawking.
Take right now, for example: this moment in the 6 o’clock hour, while two tiny boys play peek-a-boo from behind my computer. “Hi mom!” peep the shining faces as they pop around the screen then duck away giggling. Try writing. Just try it. With half your sleepy brain on right-fit words and half on “Can I has more more gam cackah?”
When the littles interrupt my self-made morning time – one curling himself into the crook of my legs and laying his heavy head on my shoulder, another lumping himself greedily into my lap – I tend toward frustration. 1) I need my arm to type. 2) I can’t see over my youngest’s curls. 3) For the love of god, what is it with kids and graham crackers? This is my time. This is my precious time!
But it’s the work of my adulthood to learn and relearn that where the time goes doesn’t matter. What matters is paying attention. Whether breathing in curls or structuring sentences, what matters is the act of giving Time a bit of deference.
It’s thinking, “Oh! I almost missed it,” this morning when I was so busy trying to cram that precious quiet time with writing, and emails, and Deep Thoughts, and only when I paused did I hear the birds. Many. Hundreds. Thousands. An ocean of bird calls. A song that only plays for a short time each summer and for a shorter time before dawn each morning, then stops as if a bird conductor has signaled the cutoff. And I – so focused on the hit of crossing a to-do off my list by 6 a.m. – almost let it drift past unnoticed.
Very little of my time feels like my own. It’s accounted for by babies, work, and my body’s relentless need for sleep. It’s embarrassing how easily and often I forget how precious it all is: the babies, the work, the sleep. The minutes don’t lose value because the assignment has changed. I can use my precious time to answer emails, or think Deep Thoughts, or deeply breathe in the smell of one small child’s babyness and curl my arm around the other’s deep need or pet our stretching cat. Who’s to say which is a better use? How will I think about my quiet minutes spent when I die? And how lucky am I that there are more meaningful things to spend time on than minutes to spend?
