These three words are the most volatile, annoying and stress inducing words any mother can hear — whether they're coming from a teenage daughter looking for a trip to the mall, another driving lesson or the golden opportunity to wash her field hockey socks or the five-year-old son standing in front of you with his big blue eyes awash with the expectation that there's nothing better that you can think of doing besides playing the game Sorry for the 27th time that day.
The minute our children are born, we become eternally, frustratingly, tirelessly and mind-numbingly busy. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, though, "not that there's anything wrong with that."
There are people who'll tell you they're "crazy busy," even when they're unencumbered with any offspring. They're busy in the sense that they do fill every minute of their days with meaningful, enjoyable tasks. However, they're not in the realm of a parent's busy circle of hell if they're telling you this on their way out to a museum, movie theatre, book launch or gallery opening — particularly if you're, at the moment, excited about going grocery shopping for some "alone time."
It's all relative. The busy-ness of a newborn parent is measured in terms of the ratio of hours slept to activities to be performed. That's to say that many of the tasks being demanded of you are fairly pedestrian and easily performed on a good night's sleep. Reduce that sleep to six fitful starts and stops over an eight-hour period, and washing sleepers, showering and remembering where you put your keys become Herculean efforts.
As the baby grows, and you add to your brood at an alarming rate, you recognize that the busy you thought you had when you were a) single and/or b) childless seemed like a "good" busy. Now that your days are filled with chauffeuring children to endless lessons, hockey arenas, friends' homes, school functions and the aforementioned mall — while racing home in between to throw in a seventh load of laundry, unload the dishwasher, again, make six calls to six doctors, madly scratch out school registration forms, plan your frozen-food dinner and tend to a wailing toddler — it's hard to find the "good" in the "busy."
Recently, as my husband sat slumped over a squirming child trying to remedy an unfortunate hockey tape incident, he looked up at me and said, "Why are we always so busy?"
Restraining myself from pointing out that it was his idea to get the third child involved in hockey, his idea to have both bathrooms renovated at the same time and his idea to have his entire family over for Sunday brunch the next day, I asked him this: "If we weren't driving them around, we'd be watching them fight. It's not a question of this versus free time. It's a question of how you are busy. Now pass me the flipping Sorry game."
All I have to do now is convince my four kids that waggling a half empty glass of Chardonnay is in fact an appropriate response to the question, "Are you busy?"
Kathy Buckworth's latest book is Journey to the Darkside: Supermom Goes Home, available in bookstores everywhere.
