“My flight leaves at 4pm on Monday. I’ll be back on Wednesday night.” says my husband.
Another business trip… as he rambles on about his trip, I glance at my calendar for next week. Each member of the family has a color. The kids are blue, I’m yellow, husband is red and the dogs are brown. Red and blue prevail on the calendar but there are a couple of smudges of yellow here and there. One of those smudges falls on his announced trip. I take a breath to mention my book club falls on that Tuesday, but the words don’t come out. Why mention it? He has to go. I erase my yellow smudge. Surely there is some hope of a sitter….maybe.
Somewhere along the line I lost control of my calendar. My mind wanders back to when my calendar was all black. No other colors were needed. There were no other colors to dictate how I spent my time. All the lines, boxes and columns were mine, all mine. Now my yellow smudges get moved around or deleted depending on everyone’s demands. The dog throws up and there goes my yellow smudge for yoga and I am off to the vet instead.
It’s not fair and quite frankly I am fed up with it.
Since when did a woman become last in line for her own life? I am woman hear me roar has turned to, I am mother hear me not. Think about it. The moment you become a mother, your life is not your own anymore. You realize you are at the command of an under ten pound being that will not relinquish that command until it weighs well over a 100 pounds and can drive itself. Over the early years of motherhood you become acutely aware that you have to adapt. It’s parenting on an evolutionary scale. Adapt or become extinct.
There are some things that have no color code associated with them. You can’t schedule the flu, however, through experience you can schedule the duration of the bug. Basic cold equals 5 days, cold with cough about two weeks and as for stomach viruses, well, there is the 24 hour kind and then there is the 4 day kind. Multiply by four people and that can span from four days to sixteen days. A sick family is the quickest way to clear a calendar.
Oh please, where is that calendar of the past with its nice neat black marks?
After I remove myself from my pity pot things start to look clearer. My life isn’t my own anymore. It shouldn’t be. I am a mother. I look at my calendar and all its blue and red marks. Everyday my yellow smudges move around and sometimes get deleted. I sit and stare at it for awhile and a smile begins on my face. I stare at my husband, my kids and dogs for along time and my heart begins to fill full. My life is much more colorful now instead of just black.
