I’ve always had trouble understanding how time was the 4th dimension. Recently, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about time: specifically the quantification of it, or in most of our cases, the specific lack of enough of it.
Parenting seems to be a massive challenge of time management. I don’t know that it always was this way. I agree with many folks who reminisce about their childhoods that children are far more scheduled and controlled now: activities, sports, games, meets, lessons, and Evite parties. All of which are arranged and managed by parents. Some folks think that the need for a stay at home parent decreases with time. I would argue that in today’s world it increases with time. When my child was four, I dropped him off at preschool in the morning and picked him up at the end of the day. With a middle schooler now, he wants to be home afterschool earlier in order to get his homework done and his instruments practiced. He has two lessons a week, two band practices a week, and one running club a week. And he’s not even in team sports. Parent’s with athletic children need a full time chauffeur. My husband recollects how he biked himself to various practices. I certainly was responsible for my own transportation and activity involvement except for the few lessons my parents deemed vital, such as swim lessons.
Reflecting on my own childhood through the lenses of my current middle-aged parenting state, I know I was cognizant of time, but more in its abundance and the thick syrupy nature of it. Boredom was never more abundant than when I was a child growing up on a farm in rural Indiana in the 197os. I had more chores than I could possibly imagine giving my child, and I spent over an hour on the school bus each day, and yet I time never moved at a rate that seemed bearable.
Remembering university, on the other hand, time didn’t seem to factor into my memories or decisions. Money did, certainly, but not time. It’s almost as if I had exactly enough time. Sure I’d complain about needing more time to write squeeze out the requisite number of pages for a paper or to cram for an exam, but I never found myself debating about which form of transportation would optimally allow me to fit in as many activities as possible.
I wonder if this relationship with time when we are children, young adults, parents, and eventually later in life has as much to do with the quantity of tasks as it does with the quantity of connections. As a child, our relationships are fewer and stronger with our family. We may have friends, but we don’t have obligations to those friends. In college, we begin loosening those familial bonds in order to develop some of the tightest most intense friendships of our lives. At least for me, the quantity was manageable because even when intertwined among a group of friends, I never felt spread thin. Perhaps because I didn’t seriously date anyone until I had graduated.
As a partnered parent, however, I have never had so many connections. I may find myself at the grocery bumping into a pediatric nurse or at the library chatting with a parent from my now-middle schooler’s preschool. My town compresses in size under the breadth of the web of connections I have developed. Don’t misunderstand, these connections can help sustain you, but they also demand something from me. To so many people, I promise, “we need to get together sometime.” Even when I accept that I can never socialize that much, there always remains a nagging guilt that I should have remembered a birthday or sent New Year’s photo cards or emailed a link to that Ted Talk I recommended.
I can’t help but wonder if re-locating, changing my other dimensions might afford me a chance to redefine my fourth dimension.