I need to learn how to accept the limitations of time. I find myself, over and again, succumbing to anxiety rooted in the inability to mold my life around the constructs of time.
The hyper awareness of time interferes with my rationale and affects some priorities that I set, decisions that I make, thoughts that I think, and emotions that I manifest.
This is already a broken record. I can tell, even before I get the words out.
There is only so much time available. Somehow I have to work, mother, keep my household, foster my friendships and tend to my budding relationship. I would like to have some self-nurturing or at least recovery time. I have to multi-task even that, and glean whatever pleasure I can wherever I can. Rather than choke at yet another chore, I choose to savor the upkeep of my household and the shopping for groceries or other sundries. It gives me a smidgen of peace.
And what of this budding relationship? How does it fit in? How does one have quality adult time and not compromise child time? Beaten down by logistics. There’s no time for seeing each other during the week, which leaves only the weekend. Friday nights are nearly shot. It’s late by the time any meeting can take place. Saturday, and part of Sunday constitute the window of opportunity and the dynamics shift dramatically as a function of child visitation arrangements. How to be relaxed and content when there’s no time for just plain living?
I don’t like juggling. I don’t like the ‘hurry up and wait’ mentality. I don’t like not knowing what time I will have with whom and when. For all I know, I could be dead in five years. Or tomorrow. I’m grateful to make it home alive, each and every day that I have to traverse the freeways in the dark, when it’s raining. It’s harrowing. I don’t want a future life, I want a now life.
So I am confounded and frustrated.
I don’t know how not to be anxious about the time. I don’t know how this life balancing act works.
Sometimes I find myself in thought, and realize that I’m not breathing. Stress. It’s a stress of some sort. I have to remind myself to breathe.
Maybe I should ask myself what I want. Why is the time or lack of it so stressful or so important? Or did I not just write ad nauseum about it?
After I’ve put the kids to bed, there is a small window of time that I get for myself. It’s all I have, and there are a thousand and one mentally, physically, spiritually, or emotionally productive or constructive things I could do with that time. But for whatever reason, the need to decompress and refuel is amplified lately, and I find myself floundering and anguishing, at a loss for doing this with the faculties I have available.
Ideally (this is pure speculation) decompression and refueling could be a symbiotic process with one’s partner, given that there is regular contact. But there isn’t regular contact, and there’s not likely to be regular contact in the foreseeable future.
So I am confounded and frustrated. And feeling alone.
I said it was a broken record.
