How We Spend Our Lives

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." - Annie Dillard

When I read that quote recently, I immediately both loved and hated the idea. One one hand, so much of my day is spent washing dishes or answering email or sitting in traffic. I hate the idea of spending my life doing menial tasks. But, on the other hand, I love the idea that our lives are right now, in every moment we spend. There is no "some day" because we don't ever arrive. We just keep moving on, moment by moment, day by day.

If we don't inhabit every day, every moment, then it's almost like we are forfeiting them. If we put things off until we have more money, until we lose weight, until we have more time, until the kids get older, until someday arrives, then our days and our lives are stunted. We think of days as expendable because they are only stepping stones to get us to our someday, where we will actually be able to enjoy ourselves. We figure we can waste the days until the good part starts because then time will stand still and we will finally be able to do and be and experience everything. When someday shows up, then we can start living.

One of the first things I thought of when I ran across that quote was how relieved I am when I get my kids to sleep for the night. Ah, me time, I sigh. But really, the life I want to look back on isn't one that features me sitting on the couch watching TV with a cocktail in my hand, grateful not to have any kids crawling all over me. The life I want to look back on is the one that features me rolling around with my two young boys, wrestling and laughing, being messy and loud and together. It's not that I need to keep them up later so I can have more hours with them; it's that I need to be with them more when I'm with them.

I need to listen to them instead of trying pathetically to multitask. I need to find joy in their waking hours and remember that the moments I spend with them make up our days together, which make up our life together. I'm a work in progress on this subject. I tend to get lost in thought. I am project minded, so free, unstructured time feels wasteful. I feel like instead of sitting at the dinner table and listening to Nico tell me a story, I should go ahead and start on the dishes while he's talking, you know, to be more productive. I try to listen, clean, and still reserve a few brain cells for the constant stream of planning and worrying, a sort of mental program that always seems to be running under all the other programs in my brain.

I remember someone telling me once that she loved every stage in her children's lives. She loved it when they were little because they were so sweet and needed her so much. When they got older, they weren't so tiny and innocent but they also didn't need the constant attention. As they became teenagers and young adults, they were even more independent but could have conversations and share ideas. And as adults, they were friends.

It is my hope that I will look back on raising my kids and be able to say I loved every stage. I hope I can be present enough to enjoy every inch of them every step along the way. I don't want to mourn the "loss" of my babies, or tell myself parenting will be manageable once we get past the toddler years, or believe I can finally have a social life when they are older. I just want to love every age, every size they pass through, every stage they enter. And in that vein, I am off now to go comfort a six year old recovering from the flu and hold a four year old who has been tugging on my shirt for however long it took me to write the last paragraph.