I'm efficient, and I know it. I can bath three children in under ten minutes, cook a fancy midweek meal in the time it takes my husband to change his clothes, clear up breakfast before the last child has finished eating it so that as the final spoon exits the final mouth I can grab it, throw it in the sink and push all of us out of the door.
So it frustrates me when someone takes ten minutes to do the buttons on their shirt or requires reminding to put their shoes on and is found ten minutes later in the living room wandering around wearing just one. I honestly can't fathom what they've been doing in the time in between. I couldn't make putting on my shoes take that long if you paid me!
So generally I try to encourage, persuade, bribe and even bully my children to learn from my zooming, time-saving, shining example. It's been requiring more marshmallows than I'd ideally like them to consume, and to be honest it's not really been working.
A long while ago I came across a poem. A terrifying thing happened to a woman around here; a Jewish 33 year old mother of three children was diagnosed with leukaemia in its late stages. At the time I was a 30 year old mother of two with one on the way, which is probably why I found it so frightening. She fought a brave and brief and very public battle, and many people learned about the value of life from her. She distributed a poem called Slow Dance, thought by some to have been written by a teenage cancer patient, although it seems actually to belong to an adult poet.
For a while afterwards I followed the advice in the poem.
You'd better slow down,
Don't dance so fast,
Time is short,
The music won't last.
Verses like:
When you run so fast to get somewhere,
you miss half the fun of getting there.
When you worry and hurry through your day,
it's like an unopened gift thrown away
were just so obviously true, and I slowed down and savoured my wonderful children. Then of course I got busy again and efficiently honed my slowing down into the minimal time frame.
It happened again not long ago. While I was busy hurrying my children to bed one night, a woman I slightly knew was rushed to hospital with a suspected brain haemorrhage. She never regained consciousness and she died just a few days later. We were from similarish backgrounds, had kids just the same ages and were sort of the same kind of family.
The thought, 'What if that had been me?' haunted me. What if that was the last time I would put my kids to bed before I never could again? What would be the chances, on any given night, that my kids would have a wonderful, or even a positive, last memory of me? What would be the chances that I had given it my best, that one last time? That I could justify my last actions in shamayim? For months it haunted me, and I used it to be so much of a better mother. I treasured my time with my children because I really felt the gift, and the brevity, of life.
Today my angle is slightly different. I have been struggling to pinpoint a certain discomfort since Pesach. It felt good to exercise my physical and spiritual muscles in preparation for and during the chag, and there was a certain disappointment in the ensuring return to normal, normal being the fight to get the kids dressed, the school run, work, school pickups, refereeing, and dinner-bath-bed. I was uncomfortable in my free time, feeling I had to justify any relaxation, not really enjoying it.
Today I realised that it's because I now have _time_. Life is not a total manic mad rush. Before Pesach it was, and since having my third child it was, and I hadn't really noticed but now...it's not. Actually I can get up at an earthly hour and be at school on time. Even if we walk. I don't have to get dinner so ready that I can slam it on the table right after we come through the door. When we get home, there's no reason I can't stop to open the post before I hang our coats up.
I don't know what triggered it this time - perhaps Hashem was answering my tefillos to have patience for them - but I turned the speed dial down today and just stopped rushing.
We took our time. I asked each child to put shoes on. I didn't ask again. I asked if they were ready. I helped. I didn't chase. I waited. I took a step back at school while they clambered out of the car, stopping with one leg in and one out to watch a dog walk by on the other side of the road. I walked slowly through the park with the baby before work and was rewarded with the sight of baby goslings, which I stopped to photograph to show the girls. I gave a friend a lift in my car in spite of the fact I was late, and ended up early. I stood in the rain listening to my daughter's friend explain how they take their shoes off in their car when it's muddy, while my daughter carefully rearranged booster seats inside the car so that she could give hers to her friend. I asked my five year old to carry a glass and my three year old a plate, to the sink, and they cleared the whole table without breaking anything. We baked cookies AFTER dinner and BEFORE baths and we read TWO stories, one with musical accompaniment.
I was living in such an uptight rush all the time, as a leftover, I think, from when I had a newborn baby and was desperately trying to give my older kids everything perfect so that they wouldn't resent him. But that super-efficient running of my day has become superfluous, and actually destructive. Kids need time. They want to tell you things and it doesn't come out in neat sentences. They have their own brains and reasons for needing to get something from the living room between their right shoe and their left. There's a whole inner world going on between them and it's just as hard for them to stop in the middle of a game as it would be for me to stop in the middle of...putting my shoes on!
They were really suffering under my reign of efficiency and in the one day I stopped I realised again what a pleasure they are, just by being allowed to be themselves.
And the best thing, the most surprisingly wonderful thing, about this, my new Theory of Everything, is that it's EASIER than not doing it. It doesn't require preparation, energy, creativity, planning, organisation. All you have to do is sloooooow doooooown. Don't try to control every movement of every child. They are not my marching band! We are a parade, a procession, and each child is their own float with their own music and decorations and personality.
I rushed for so long, and I was wondering what that nagging feeling was that I was missing something that I could be doing with my spare time, and all I had to do was slow down and enjoy what I'm doing already.
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