TIME TO STAND AND STARE

Time is passing too quickly. I don't mean the years although, Lord knows they are flying past with a frightening velocity. No, I mean the actual days. I wake up with the best intentions and a long list of tasks to be achieved and I go to bed with a mild sense of disappointment having not got nearly as far down it as I had hoped.

I have vague recollections of waking up of my own accord in the morning, stretching indulgently and wondering to myself - well. What shall I do today? I suspect that harps back to the pre-children days. I must have still had housework to do but you don't make much of a mess when there's just you. Now if I am not careful whole days get engulfed by the stuff.

And when I read the paper to try and engage with the world outside my window, I am told that I should be making my windfall apples into crumbles for the freezer and planting green manure in my veg patch. But the apples lie on the lawn as if to mock me and the soil is bare where my veg was. By the time I have finished doing all the day to day stuff, I can't seem to find the drive to do the extras. The nice bits if you like. There just doesn't seem to be enough hours in my day to fit it all in.

Perhaps I need a new approach. I could decide that today I am not going to do the hoovering but instead I will bake cup cakes with exotic looking frostings. Or instead of ferrying the children around to after school activities, we will all go for a romp in the woods and build shelters with bracken and make warrior face paints from mud. Or instead of washing, up we could have a huge bonfire in the back garden and watch the sparks soar up into the sky until after dark.

I look around me though and realise that it's not just me. Almost all the women I know assume that other women are better at managing their time, make more exciting meals, spend more quality time with their children and are able to find plenty of time during the day to relax in whichever way suits them best. In actual fact, we are all just running around trying hard to hold it all together as best we can.

I know that I could make my life easier by taking short cuts but I don't think I would gain any satisfaction from taking that course. Do I really need a freezer full of fruit products? I think what I really crave is time to think - time when I can clear my mind of the day to day mundanities and let my imagination wander where it wishes without getting bogged down with what is for tea and whose birthday is coming up. To achieve that I will need to be more disciplined and not allow myself to become distracted by the voices in my head. And perhaps I can get up earlier! Who needs sleep?