Wrong! No matter how you approach it, there are and always will be just 24 hours in a day. For health reasons, I find it necessary to appoint 7 of those hours to sleeping. For spiritual reasons, I try to devote at least 1/2 hour to God, in prayer and study and sometimes, I feel I need time than just a mere half hour. Let's say, for the sake of argument that I devote 1 hour a day to necessary bodily functions like eating and bathroom breaks. I've used up 9 of those 24 hours and I haven't even begun housework or writing! I am now down to a mere 15 hours to accomplish everything I want to do, everything I ought to do and everything anyone else wants me to do, too. I feel my shoulders and neck tense just thinking of the time constraint.
Because my family is, to all intents, grown (the youngest is 15), and our family is small (just 3 plus two cats and a dog in our home), I am able to keep my home looking nice and neat by spending a mere 2 hours a day at basic pick-up and cleaning housework. I devote about an hour to the preparation and following clean-up of each meal. Oops, I just lost three more hours! Now I have 12 hours to call my own.
I write two newsletters and a daily blog on Xanga that is linked to one of those newsletters, and I have a deep-seated need to just write, I allot at least 4 hours per day to writing. Now we've squashed my remaining day into 8 hours.
Given my home is just like any other there are always major projects going on. Whether it's the necessary deep cleaning chores, re-organization of a problem area, the acquisition of something new that requires re-arranging a room, yard work, mending, home decor problems to address, etc. There is the time allowance also for any thing anyone else thinks I should devote time to, like playing chauffeur or secretary or grocery shopping and such. I can easily use up another 4 hours.
I reserve the final four hours for 'resting', which in a woman's world, means that I get up and down from my seat nine or ten or twenty times to find what can't be seen by the naked eye of others living in the household (Thank God for mom's having 'x-ray' vision to see what is right in the front of any cabinet or fridge!), fetch a cup of coffee for my tired working man hubby, help dear daughter locate the ONLY shirt she can possibly wear to school the next day, retrieve any number of other 'lost' items that I am told only I could have possibly moved (but we all know I would never have put it THERE!), turn on the fan because someone is too hot, turn down the bed (my doesn't it look welcoming...sigh), switch on the outside lights for the dog who is afraid of the dark, load the dishwasher at least six times more (how can that sink continually refill when we aren't eating?!), etc, etc.
And this is the day of a woman who can actually say with a straight face that she has time of her own! Believe me, my heart aches for the mother of babies and toddlers, who are active from sunlight to sunlight with brief naps in between. And working moms who give up ten hours or more of their day to a job outside of the home jobs that require their attention.
I say all of this because, quite simply I came this close (-) to signing up as a guest writer on another website to do a weekly article. And just as I filled in the required info, I heard my husband say, as he did just a couple of weeks ago when I stated I'd begun a new blog, "But dear, do you really have time to write MORE every day?" He was more concerned about me than I am about myself. Well really, why shouldn't he be?
He is the one who is most likely to reap the woman who is too tired to think at day's end, who groans each time she moves. I assured him that this blog is meant just for me, a quiet spot to reason out a few things, to write without editing too closely, and wasn't meant for daily posts.
So I stopped just before hitting 'send' and listened to what he was saying to me just a few days ago. "You do enough already. Don't shortchange yourself or your family. Reserve a little time for the every day things. Don't be spendthrifty with your time, you can't reclaim it."
Whew! I came darned close! I have to be more vigilant about guarding my time.
Given my home is just like any other there are always major projects going on. Whether it's the necessary deep cleaning chores, re-organization of a problem area, the acquisition of something new that requires re-arranging a room, yard work, mending, home decor problems to address, etc. There is the time allowance also for any thing anyone else thinks I should devote time to, like playing chauffeur or secretary or grocery shopping and such. I can easily use up another 4 hours.
I reserve the final four hours for 'resting', which in a woman's world, means that I get up and down from my seat nine or ten or twenty times to find what can't be seen by the naked eye of others living in the household (Thank God for mom's having 'x-ray' vision to see what is right in the front of any cabinet or fridge!), fetch a cup of coffee for my tired working man hubby, help dear daughter locate the ONLY shirt she can possibly wear to school the next day, retrieve any number of other 'lost' items that I am told only I could have possibly moved (but we all know I would never have put it THERE!), turn on the fan because someone is too hot, turn down the bed (my doesn't it look welcoming...sigh), switch on the outside lights for the dog who is afraid of the dark, load the dishwasher at least six times more (how can that sink continually refill when we aren't eating?!), etc, etc.
And this is the day of a woman who can actually say with a straight face that she has time of her own! Believe me, my heart aches for the mother of babies and toddlers, who are active from sunlight to sunlight with brief naps in between. And working moms who give up ten hours or more of their day to a job outside of the home jobs that require their attention.
I say all of this because, quite simply I came this close (-) to signing up as a guest writer on another website to do a weekly article. And just as I filled in the required info, I heard my husband say, as he did just a couple of weeks ago when I stated I'd begun a new blog, "But dear, do you really have time to write MORE every day?" He was more concerned about me than I am about myself. Well really, why shouldn't he be?
He is the one who is most likely to reap the woman who is too tired to think at day's end, who groans each time she moves. I assured him that this blog is meant just for me, a quiet spot to reason out a few things, to write without editing too closely, and wasn't meant for daily posts.
So I stopped just before hitting 'send' and listened to what he was saying to me just a few days ago. "You do enough already. Don't shortchange yourself or your family. Reserve a little time for the every day things. Don't be spendthrifty with your time, you can't reclaim it."
Whew! I came darned close! I have to be more vigilant about guarding my time.
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