Time.
Time is the thing that I have come to value in my life above so many other wants. I don’t love time like a pastry or lament it’s passing like the loss of a loved one, but I hunger for it now as I quickly approach the half century mark and resent like hell when it’s wasted with things beyond my control and without necessity.
As I write this now, we sit in the midst of a global pandemic. Covid has chased us from our restaurants and workplaces and now I teach high school art from the comfort of my basement classroom, piped into the homes of my drooping students via the internet. And I’m lucky, I know! I have a job that I can do, as does my wife, Action Girl. Our son, Short Stack (who’s nickname no longer fits as he has long passed the height of his mother) and I no longer go into a building each day to work and learn, but do it all via cameras and microphone. Our daughter, Lulu Belle attends school both virtually and with a smattering of in school experience and Action Girl has gone four days a week, with all possible protections taken and fingers firmly crossed. There is a lot of grumbling and deprivation out there right now, but we as a family are fortunate and know it well and never forget that.
I have time. It’s not ideal time at the moment, to be sure, but it’s time nonetheless. I’ve had a lot of different jobs in my life doing a lot of very different things, from working behind a desk to working over an endless vat of bait fish and each job has taught me something different and yet… each job has also taught me one thing over and over and over again. Time.
Time is the only thing you can’t really make. You can work at making yourself rich or happy or brave or strong or any number of things but you can’t make any more time than you get. It’s what it is. That’s your allotment, so be careful with it. In my past working incarnations, I have done work that took all of it. I very proudly started and ran a successful manufacturing business for ten years and it runs still, to this day, but not with me. There was a moment where I realized that I was working away the hours of not my life, but my children’s lives. Short Stack was two and Lulu Belle, newly born and I was working sixty to eighty hours a week. That made no sense to me, so I left it to become Dad at Home while Action Girl went back to running coastal ferry boats. I stayed with the babies and she became “Mumma on the Phone”. Action Girl doesn’t sit still well and though the idea of being a stay at home mother sent her screaming for the trees, being “Mumma on the Phone” wore her down as well and it was time for a change for her as well. Or rather, it was time for a change back.
Action Girl and I have a lot in common (and not just our now thirty years of co-experience) and one in particular was a key that we had stuffed in a drawer long ago and let gather dust. It was time to rummage around in the dark, looking for it. We needed the key. We also needed to polish it up again after so much disuse. Teaching.
We both love the act of teaching and had gone to school for it, but as a kid fresh out of college, getting a teaching job means years of garbage work. They used you as a substitute. They use you as an Ed Tech. They used you for behavioral problems. They used you and use you and used you hard and all the while, pay you garbage, all with the carrot of, “If you suffer this for as long as we want you to suffer, then someday you might get a classroom.” Both of us had traveled this road when we were fresh from college and both of us had walked away weary and beaten. But that was then. We were young and still easily swayed. We lacked life experience. We still were unsure and worried about displeasing. Age can change that, and it definitely did for us. After starting and running a manufacturing business, becoming an IT Director for a local company and then switching to twenty-four/seven infant care for me and running a crew on a variety of multi-tonne, sea going vessels for her, schools just weren’t that intimidating any more. We could do this, so we did.
It wasn’t quite as simple as all that, naturally! I was insanely fortunate to luck into a job that would let me study to regain my teaching licenses, all while pulling a paycheck. I got in at just the right moment and through some perfect timing and force of will, I managed to carve out the place where I have taught for the last several years. Action Girl had a harder time finding her way back in which included getting a higher degree, bouncing around from school to school in search of a position that lasted more than a year at a time, but she’s there now too with her own classroom and students and is content. We did it. So what did we get? Well…
We both absolutely love doing what we do, even in a pandemic that makes the job that much harder and much less rewarding. It’s a fantastic thing to look forward to tackling each day, but here’s the thing, we only tackle it when it’s in session, and there’s a lot of time it isn’t. That’s not to say that the job is an easy one. It absolutely isn’t, but…Summers are ours now, as an entire family! Breaks happen simultaneously for all four of us! We all get home (when we are at our respective schools) at about the same time and most of all, we can, with a little bit of luck, all get the same unexpected snow day off together. We have time.
Having the time to walk with my kids or my wife, to play a computer game or one of Action Girl’s beloved board games is just a gift. Sure, Monday through Friday is a thing, but it’s not always a thing and on those days, we indulge in being who we are. There is really nothing to compare. Action Girl, much to my joyful surprise has embraced quilt making with a fevered passion, something she never would have had time for with a job that makes you sign up for blocks of time to work. The work would have always been too tempting and the time would have been lost to the wheelhouse. Lulu Belle draws and paints endlessly while listening to shows on her headphones. Short Stack, being fourteen, is glued to his computer and I… well… So many things, but mainly I build. I make. I create.
I can’t not.
And though I fill my time, I do know that time is there. I still don’t sit still well, (well… unless I’m building something), but at least have time to do the things I deem important. Someday, our plan is to have more time and to take it and adventure again. We will travel and look and laugh and eat and share our time with others again. We’ll be busy, but busy on our terms and when it gets tiresome, which it does sooner than it used to, we’ll stop for a while, open a bottle of something nice, and enjoy the quiet of time to ourselves.
Almost there, again.
Hang in there.
Filed under: building, family, happy, home, Ruminating, Work | Tagged: employment, free time, school, teaching, time, Work | 2 Comments »