Zen and the Art of Stay at Home Motherhood

The Pigeon of Discontent this week on Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project blog is about avoiding wasting time on mindless things. I feel like so much of my day is filled with mindless things it is sometimes hard to tell which part is “wasting” time and which part is more like doing time. I hang up backpacks and jackets only to find them on the floor again. Someone is hungry for lunch before the dishes are washed from breakfast. I empty and re-load the dishwasher about 800 times a day, or so it seems. I am always doing laundry, yet the hampers are always full. A friend of mine told me that she loves doing laundry because she loves the feeling of satisfaction she gets when all the clothes are clean and put away. I never seem to get to that point. Laundry is more of a cyclical process than a chore with a beginning and an end. There is no end. The end is only the beginning.

Ms. Rubin’s advice is about not wasting time puttering around on the Internet or Facebook when you are really supposed to be doing something else. I am definitely guilty of that, too. I am the first to admit that I am totally addicted to Facebook and that I spend far too much time poking around on news sites. Are these mindless activities? I don’t think so. Are they the best use of my time? Probably not. For me, these are an escape from the mindless activities that take up so much of my time.

When I was in college and I had a big paper to write or a test to study for, I always wanted to clean my room or wash a sink full of dishes before I could tackle the work I had to do. I think I liked the feeling of accomplishment of seeing a big mess and making it go away. Now I feel like every time I tackle one mess, three more grow back in its place. Housework is never satisfying because there is no end, no completion, no sense of accomplishment. I should try to learn to appreciate these things for what they are, live in the moment, appreciate the journey and not worry about the destination and all that. Bah. What I need is for something different to happen.