On Parenting 

Perspective

No, I don’t have a minute to be a more

productive parent
By Marie Holmes
January 4
I’m carrying my work bag, my daughter’s backpack, my son’s violin and an
oversized shopping bag teeming with fragile art projects, and I’m trying to
cram all of it, plus my two kids, into an elevator at 6 p.m. on a weeknight.
My son asks to stop by the drugstore on the way home to check out the toy
selection. “Please, Mommy,” he whines. “It’ll only take a minute.”
How many times a day do I hear that? The emails, the phone calls, the sign-
ups and RSVPs. The list of “just-a-minute” requests that I cannot fulfill
never ends.
No, I tell my son. We don’t have time tonight: There is homework to do,
quizzes to sign, instruments to practice, small hands and feet to wash —
and somewhere in there, I need to provide a meal.
“But it doesn’t have to be this way,” a thousand helpful Internet advisers
tell me. There are shortcuts. It’s not that there isn’t enough time, they say,
it’s that I’m not effectively using the time I have.
You see, I’m squandering. I sleep. I exercise. I read long news articles. I am
a terrible thief, stealing time from myself. It’s the way I know how to be in
the world, and I’m resistant to learning new routines. But we are living in
the age of productivity, where humans, like machines, can be hacked to
improve their performance. If only I were more receptive to expert
feedback, I could morph into Me 2.0. I could be doing much more, more
quickly.
For example, I should set the table for breakfast every night before I go to
bed. That one sounds simple. But setting the table requires clean bowls,
which requires emptying the dishwasher and filling it again, and while I’m
there, I might as well scrub the crusty pots soaking in the sink, because it’s
gross to just let them sit there, and what kind of mother am I? And it will, of
course, take only a minute.
So now it has been 15 minutes — time that I should have spent answering
emails or folding laundry or sleeping. Those 15 minutes have to come from
somewhere. Do I take them from my morning workout? Do I skip the
workout altogether the next day, accepting that I’ll be cranky by noon? Or
do I get up and go running anyway, knowing that if I don’t, that 15 minutes
will take the form of delayed response time throughout the day, as my mind
takes longer to produce a coherent thought?
Let’s try another one. What if I batch-cooked dinners on the weekends for
the week ahead? Wouldn’t that make sense? Or at the very least, I could cut
up fruit and vegetables in advance, so that when my kids ask for a snack I
can toss them a container full of fruit, instead of an individually wrapped
energy bar (which, let’s be honest, is really nothing more than a dressed-up
cookie). If I spend an hour or two cooking, or simply chopping, on Sunday,
though, I don’t get any work done. So I have to stay up late, and again must
choose between sleep and exercise. As if I didn’t already feel like a time
glutton for presuming I could have both.
[When I got dumped, I didn't hide my heartbreak from my kids]
Modern parenting, often accomplished while working full-time, and
without help from extended family, is maddening enough without the
added pressure of being constantly told that if only you were more efficient,
you could have a clean shirt and your kids could have Instagram-worthy
bento boxes for lunch. I’m sure if I were willing to make the commitment,
there are plenty of life hacks that would improve things around our house. I
could, for example, devise a Pinterest-worthy system to organize the boots
and coats that clog the entryway. Or lay out everyone’s clothes the night
before. Or prepare healthful foods in advance.
But I often can’t think ahead. Sometimes I can hardly think at all because I
am so overwhelmed, and what I really want is not for someone with a nicer-
looking life than mine to share their efficiency secrets, but for a fellow
bedraggled parent to tell me, “I know. It’s all too much.” Sometimes I do
not want an action plan or concrete steps toward self-improvement. I
simply long for the time-sucking luxury of my frustrations being heard.
There are days when I say yes to my kids’ small requests — looking at the
toys, stopping for ice cream, watching a train pass — because I am too tired
to say no, and other days when I purposefully veer us off course. I want
them to experience time as not only something for which to plan, but
something to savor, in all its decadence.
Marie Holmes is a mother and freelance writer. She lives in New York
with her partner and two children.
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