Packing the Car

Sometimes I wonder if I am repeating myself when I bring up these images that figure in my thinking on the blog.  I guess if I don't remember whether or not I've written about it, people are unlikely to remember reading about it, so here goes.

I've always been good at packing.  I have good "spatial awareness"or good "spatial-temporal reasoning" or whatever you want to call it.  I'm really good with directions because I can almost always orient myself inside a city, a transit system, an unfamiliar building, etc.  It also means I can look at an assortment of items, look at the space they need to fit into, and play the mental game of tetris required to get them in.  I just see it; I've always been this way.  I've been thinking about this a lot since becoming a mother.  It feels like there are now way too many packages to fit in the car of my life.  Since Nora was born, I feel like I've been shuffling them around, taking them in and out, trying to figure out which ones need to go on which trip and which ones can be left at home.  (I also feel like I forget, trip over, and lose plenty of them, but that's perhaps better left to a different post.)  I've come to accept that I'm never going to fit all the metaphorical packages into my metaphorical car all at once, and that's okay.  This is a sign of good fortune, isn't it?  To have more than enough metaphorical packages than one life can hold?

Even so, it's nice to be able to fit more of "me" into the car these days.  I've finally been able to start running again.  A few nights a week after Nora goes to sleep, Billy stays in so I can go for a run.  (I've tried pushing her in the BOB, but that package doesn't fit yet.  She gets cranky around one mile in, so she's in training to try to increase her distance, too.)  I've been running the short loop around my house of about 2.25 miles, and then last night I got in my head that I was going to go 4 miles.  I was surprised that I didn't have to stop to walk.  It has been so long since I achieved a runner's high that I hardly recognized it when it struck, but it was such a welcome sensation.  Having an iPhone also means I could reactivate my Nike+ account, which has been dormant since my iPod nano broke in early 2010.  I've even managed to get my nails back in shape and to paint them a few times recently!  This might seem exceptionally trivial to anyone else, but polished nails had become something of a trademark for me over the past few years, and it keeps me from biting them down to nubs, so it is nice to have them back.

It seems to be popular for a lot of moms to complain online about how they never get any time to themselves.  They're "so busy taking care of their children that they don't even have a chance to shower!", etc.  I'm pretty sure this is what kids today would call a #humblebrag.  It's not difficult to come across postings which reveal a competition between moms trying to prove how little time they devote to themselves; I guess the implication is that the best moms only think of their children and never think of themselves.  I don't subscribe to this martyr's mentality, though-- I belong to the "make sure I get a shower every day" school of motherhood.  It's my opinion that if I'm not at my best, I can't give Nora my best, and I can't be at my best if I completely neglect my own well-being.  First Lady Michelle Obama caused a minor stir around the holidays for suggesting something similar in this video clip (which also shows adorable Bo-themed decorations in the White House), but I agree with her wholeheartedly.  I also agree that prioritizing your own needs is especially important behavior to model if you are a mother of a daughter, unless you want her to believe that she doesn't deserve to spend some time doing things for herself once she has children.

So I'm thankful that as Nora gets older, it continues to be easier for me to find time to devote to things that benefit her indirectly by improving my own mood.  I think I'll always be shifting the packages in and out of the car, and her packages will always be important, but I insist that we both benefit when I can find a way to fit some of my own packages inside, too.

Now that summer's here, I hope I'll be able to figure out how to devote some serious time to my academic work.  The blog is called Diaper Changes AND Doctoral Studies, after all.