Multitasking

Life has gotten busier as the kids have gotten older, pandemic or no. It is demoralizing and destabilizing to think about how life and time just marches on relentlessly, perhaps a bit more so because I had my head down for most of this last year, hiding in my lockdown with my snacks and books and babies who are no longer babies.

Now that the kids are 3 and 6, we are doing things like going camping and going swimming and going on bike rides and sitting around during soccer practice. The above picture is from Caleb’s soccer practice, where Naomi and I hung around on the sidelines while Jon went into the shop. Here I am multi-tasking, yet another verb that has gotten a bad rap that I do basically all the time, mostly out of existential angst at life slipping past me: Caleb at soccer, reading, eating breakfast, taking a photograph for social media, and “supervising” Naomi, who is off cavorting somewhere on the other side of the park, co-mingling with other unvaccinated children, texting Jon about complicated customer service questions people are messaging me about on Instagram.

These days it seems like there is a lot of judgement around hyper competitive parents who overschedule their kids, not allowing them to have unfettered childhoods of gazing at the sky and being bored. I am striking no good balance at all, careening wildly between overscheduling them in the wrong things and underscheduling them in missed opportunities. A white lady at my church once shared with me derisively about an Asian family she knew that had scheduled their child into nightly Chinese lessons in an effort to teach them the language. What sort of childhood is that! Every night! I nodded grimly and glumly in agreement as paranoid and hyper active marbles rolled around loose in my skull, and thought to myself: where can I sign up my kids for that. My culture-less, language-less, feral children. “In the next twenty years,” the lady went on. “Everyone here will be speaking English in any case.” “Haha,” I said.

It turns out I really liked the above photo, even though relatively few people on social media actually, literally liked it. It is representative of so many of my favourite things. Reading, letter writing, coffee, a mask that I’ve sewn myself. Shade. No children. I need no reminder to slow down as all I do is think at warp speed about life seems to be zooming past me.