The Careful Art of Balancing Time

The blog redesign is almost finished, finally. Of course I’m feeling guilty for having spent so much time with it over the this week. When I took this on last Saturday it was with so much excitement and enthusiasm! It’s so easy for me to brighten up at the new, especially when I have a sprinkling of manic/depressive in me to brighten my brights and darken my darks. But there have been moments — especially what with this double whammy of work to do — when I’ve felt a yearning for the swelling emotional closeness with Del I felt in the first month after the birth.

That’s not to say that I feel distant, of course. And of course, like a parent, I blame myself. Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone after that job last month… even 12-20 extra hours over the course of two weeks is a lot to distract me away from my three-month old. Perhaps I should have waited before working on the new blog domain and redesign… given myself a break to rebond. Oh the perpetual self-doubt of attachment parenting! Jeska, of my local parenting group said it first, and I have to agree with her.

But, we work with the future. Somebody said, “I put all my focus on the future, because that’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.” I’ll have to look that one up, it’s a keeper and deserves some credit. I’m very excited to be nearly finished with this update, so the next step is really to find some balance and hopefully add some routine to my life, so I can reign in a bit of the obsessiveness that comes over me when I start a project (and unfortunately doesn’t always stay with me until the end!).

I checked The Baby Sleep Book out of the library, which should give me some much needed help on establishing routines. Of course the four famous Sears who wrote the book did it with the purpose of helping folks build positive sleep routines for their children. Can I use it to help build positive work routines for me? What I need is just some kind of container that I can put my work time into, so that it won’t spillith over into the time I need to give my children. It’s so easy to “skip” things… like yesterday I skipped Stae’s daily after school notebook check in favor of last minute grocery shopping, which led to skipping it again in favor of serious money talk with Ben.

Some people need routines to be able to relax, to be able to transition. I think I need routines to stay present, to get out of my head, to get back to the now of who’s around me, what’s happening, what needs to be done. Here’s to getting back to that while holding on to our childish enthusiasms.

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