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I wish I could trade places with my cat. She lies there on the cushioned bench swing in the morning sun, utterly and completely relaxed and blissfully sleeping. She’s oblivious and impervious to all the daily comings and goings I find myself maddeningly overwhelmed by. I envy her peacefulness.
Being the mother of four kids I find myself on the road constantly and constantly being interrupted. I wanted to be self-employed and work out of my home so I could have the freedom to be here for my kids. But when I’m in a crunch to get a major project done I find my time comes in nickels and dimes. It can be aggravating.
I get up in the mornings when they do, but my time gets eaten away until suddenly its noon. We live in the country, in an unincorporated area of the county, so everything is a long drive. Four kids, in three different schools at different ends of town. Each trip out and back is at least 30 to 40 minutes. We tried the school bus not long after we moved here and it was horrible; my kids spent four hours a day on the school bus and the bus driver wouldn’t let them do their homework on the bus. When you include trips in and out of town for ballet lessons, martial arts lessons, after school club meetings, and picking the high schoolers up from sports practice, I spend my life driving!! I must spend three to four hours a day on the road. That seriously cuts out time I have available for work, let alone creativity and innovation.
Because of the recession, demand for my business IT services has dwindled, but that has freed up time for me to finally work on the publishing projects and personal websites I’ve been needing to do for some time, but couldn’t because of demands for my time from my customers. It always seems that when things finally quiet down for a day, or a week, then people start coming out of the woodwork demanding my services. When that happens I put my personal projects on the back burner, once again, and they get abandoned and neglected for a time.
Sanity Check. Those are the projects that bring me joy, contentment, and satisfaction. I need them for my sanity, to feel like there’s meaning and purpose in my life. I need the time and space to spend on these projects to help me cope with the madness that is my everyday life. And because I know deep down that the time I spend on those will earn me a far greater return (financially) on my investment then trading my time for money for business.
A day in the Life…
The phone calls, paying bills, trips to the grocery store (2 –3 times per week), constant barrage of emails, piles of dirty laundry needing washing and clean washing needing folding, the clutter piling up on the kitchen counters, living room floors, the crumbs beneath my bare feet in the kitchen, toothpaste all over the bathroom, toilets and sinks that keep backing up when you flush them, income tax returns (yay, fun!), sibling fights, a third grader who won’t do her homework, a bedroom that’s such a disaster we can’t find clean underwear or a matching pair of shoes, a 5-year old who takes 5 minutes to get in and out of a car every time and gets herself completely undressed whenever she’s home, always having to break from working to cook dinner, supervising bath time and tucking into bed (“We want Mommy to kiss us goodnight!”), the dentist appointments, orthodontist appointments, doctor’s appointments, refilling prescriptions, picking them up from school when they’re sick, delivering forgotten school books to the school, meeting with teacher, school psychologists, student guidance counselors, awards night, back to school night, the talent show, ‘Mommy will you go on our next field trip with us?”, “Mom I have to bring________ to school tomorrow, can you get some at the store?”, I need to change the sheets on my bed, are we out of cat food AGAIN?…
I haven’t included the work demands on my time that I try to squeeze in around the edges. My work is demanding, requiring enormous focus and brainpower to maintain my place in multiple locations simultaneously. It’s detail-oriented and requires everything to be exactly perfect, or the computer blows it up. If I’m missing a “>” or a “.” That can cause an entire application to fail. And I have
