Pedaling

I have discovered that when you have children, life can be so busy, that you tend to settle into survival mode.  Whether you have one or five, I tend to see as shades of grey –– any number of children is challenging.  But when you have five, and some of them are very young, life is especially bare-bones.  As a mother, I have a finite amount of time and energy.  The longer I have been at this, the more impressed I have been with my own ability to frequently find more time and energy as needed, but ultimately, you hit the wall, you max out, you realize you have nothing left to give.

Just getting my family of seven through a day is a full-time job, and with an infant and a toddler, I found myself falling into bed each night, exhausted, simply having gotten through another day.  Nothing major had been crossed off the to-do list, and I couldn’t really quantify anything that I’d done.  I have thus long considered myself the busiest person I know who accomplishes absolutely nothing. 

But I have learned that parenting is perhaps the most extreme big-picture activity: it takes a really long time to see the results of anything that you do.  For me, it has taken years to catch a glimpse of how my daily investments are shaping five incredible children.  And to realize that in fact, when looking at the big picture, my accomplishments are already huge.

But it turns out that life happens in the small picture, and in that place, I have, for a very long time, seen myself as coasting.  You’re coasting when the bike is moving, you’re on a downhill, you have serious momentum and there’s not a whole lot to do except hang on and steer.  In my case, some of this is literal.  A substantial part of my day is spent driving my children to one place or another, or making sure they are going in the direction they need to go.  For me, my priorities as a mother have been to make sure my children are loved, fed, clothed, warm, busy and happy, not necessarily in that order.  Unfortunately, the little ones have needed more of my time and effort to get to those places, which has meant that the bigger ones have gotten a little less of my time and energy.  But now, the incredible thing is that all of a sudden I have time leftover after I do the bare minimum, and that I can begin to think about adding other priorities to my mothering.  And –– it’s amazing to discover –– to my life beyond mothering.

And so, I can hardly believe it, but I am ready to start pedaling again.  I can’t tell you how great that feels.

So far, in the past month, we have added three soccer teams and two gymnastics classes to our agenda.  We are painting and decorating parts of our house that we hadn’t yet had the time or energy to tackle.  And probably, most amazingly, I have taken a trip alone, by myself to visit my brother and his family –– something I haven’t done since long before I met my media naranja.  I have had three whole days here, where I have only had to worry about what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go.  And that has given me the time to finally start this blog and to write a bit about the stuff that’s been in my head for years.

Tomorrow I will go back home, and I will jump right back in, going pretty much straight from the airport to Ethan’s soccer game.  Anthony will stay on to watch AJ’s game, while I take the other kids and head over to celebrate the first birthday of our littlest boy –– our godson, Owen.  And by night time, I will probably feel as if I never left.  But I will know that I did.  And I will remember how great it was.  And I will start to think about what other new things my family and I are ready to do. 

It feels kind of awesome to pedal.