Seventeen Minutes
by Kelly Dolin in Family on Friday, June 25, 2010 6:00 AM
Years ago – when I was the mother of one son—I came upon an article bent on exposing a truth about stay-at-home mothers. Mothers leave the work place, the article stated, with high-minded goals. They envision days filled with reading, puzzles, art projects, leisurely strolls.
In reality, so the article said, these mothers spend all but a pittance of their time juggling household responsibilities—housework, phone calls, car pools. Stimulating activities? According to the author, they’re just not happening.
Research proved, the article stated, that stay-at-home mothers interact with their children seventeen minutes per day.
Seventeen minutes!
“Ridiculous,” I thought. I put it out of mind as so much dissing of stay-at-home-moms.
Our family has since grown from three to six, and life is a tad fuller than the day I first read that article. This past fall “Labor Day” seemed an especially apt moniker. I had just given birth to little Ainsley, but labor suddenly seemed easier than the grueling schedule that began as the calendar flipped from August to September. We waved good-bye to a laid back summer and launched into a host of activities – soccer, catechesis, Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, altar servers. Let the games begin!
I experienced days of performing all household chores with a phone glued to my ear and a baby at my breast. “Multi-tasking” seemed to reach a new high (or low?) as I struggled to handle my responsibilities and coordinate the boys’ activities. Many days the older boys had to be in different places at different times, the toddler’s nap was squeezed out of the schedule, and Tim handed off his school uniform as I yelled, “Go long for your cleats!”
The stresses of an already full life were compounded when an extended bout of Swine Flu and its attendant secondary infections plowed through house like a freight train. I nursed the baby in the parking lot of doctors’ offices and paid bills waiting for prescriptions to be filled.
Some days I fought panic and tears and thought, “This simply can’t be done.”
While I seized the crock pot with more regularity than usual, I also hit the Golden Arches with more frequency than the budget or the waistline could manage.
Soccer season is only ten weeks. Only ten weeks,” I consoled myself.
Seventeen minutes uninterrupted by phone, practice, or a poopy diaper suddenly seemed a luxury. That writer, I thought, was on to something.
This is the battle we fight, we women who are open to life, who are trying to build the Kingdom of God, who are living out our sanctification in a bustling American society. It is not for the faint of heart. Sometimes we have to fight for our seventeen minutes.
Songwriter Marie Bellet captures this conundrum so beautifully in her song Mother, You Are Worried:
Mother, you are worried about many, many things.
We want you to lay down with us and rub our backs and sing.
You could tell us stories. No, we don’t like counting sheep.
You can make your phone calls after we are all asleep.
Oh, Mother, you are worried about way too many things.
Like all mothers, I try to put the important before the merely urgent. The telephone? The ringing makes it urgent, but rarely is it important. Faith formation? Important, vitally important, but it comes with no buzzer or alarm. The challenge is to put the noise aside and to live an intentional life, not an accidental one.
We weigh each activity and consider its impact on the entire family. Sometimes we make the painful choice to cut out something we love and value. With my last two babies, I took “maternity leave,” even though I’m a stay-at-home mother. John and Ainsley were both late summer babies. I decided to take the fall off from my regular activities and resume them after Christmas. I enjoyed the extended “babymoon.”
We, of course, survived soccer season. And basketball season. And last night we had our final baseball game. The calendar page has flipped again and suddenly summer is upon us.
We will embrace the slower pace. We will loll around in the mornings, swim in the afternoon, play lots of Uno when it rains. Bring on the puzzles, the books, the leisurely strolls. I plan to reclaim my seventeen minutes and then some.
—Kelly Dolin is a wife, mother, homemaker, and catechist. She blogs at In the Sheepfold.
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
