1 Mother 2 Another

As I began to tell people this summer that
I’d be a baby empty-nester – both kids in full-time
school – come fall, I also began hearing the same question
over and over again. Sometimes asked wistfully, sometimes
bewilderingly, sometimes dripping with envy, but almost always the
same question:


“So . . . what are you going to do all day then?”


And you know what’s ridiculous? I often feel the need to give
a play-by-play justification of an answer to them. “Well,
I’m going to spend hours cooking gourmet dinners, and change
the sheets on the bed every day, and of course devote a significant
amount of time to caring for the poor.”

But why is that? I spent a couple decades
as an adult before I had kids, and no one ever asked me what I did
all day. And truth be told, sometimes I look back on my
pre-children stage and ask myself what I did all day before
I had kids; I find my time so filled with cleaning up cheerios and
matching tiny socks and scrambling to find homework and buying
larger sizes of tights and scheduling pediatrician appointments
– all while maintaining a modicum of a social life, and
smidgen of a marriage, and a decent dollop of volunteering time in
the community - that I honestly can’t figure out what I did
before with the what looks now like copious amounts of unclaimed
time I had in my previous life.


I work outside the home now, just as I have the past few years,
teaching a couple nights a week and a couple days while the girls
are in school. And any teacher out there knows that with a class
comes lesson plans, gathering materials, Xeroxing papers, and more.
During my “free” time, of course. And much of my time
will be taken up with the same stuff that occupied my life before
the girls were in school: cleaning up cheerios and matching tiny
socks and scrambling to find homework and scheduling pediatrician
appointments . . . the only difference is that I will not be doing
these things while refereeing a grudge match between the girls or
taking breaks to have a dance party to Train’s
“Mermaid” every five minutes.


So while the girls are at school, I will do the grocery shopping,
wash five loads of laundry, put them away, weed out too-small
clothes, pay bills, write my lesson plans, clean toilets, and get
on with my day. I will work my butt off so that the time the girls
are home is free-and-clear pay-attention-to-them time.


And occasionally – occasionally- I will have a long
coffee with a girlfriend after morning Bible study. Because
that’s what all those non-kid friends do with their days
sometimes, too.