The Better Question
By Ashlee Gadd
@ashleegadd
"What are you going to do with all that time?"
This is the question people ask when they hear I have finally—finally!—reached The Magical Stage of Parenting where all three of my children are in school for 6+ hours a day.
For the past few months, I've been asking myself the same question. What am I going to do with all this time? Should I get another job to supplement our family income? Start volunteering? Revamp my photography business? Try to write another book?
Those are big options on the table, but I've got plenty of little options, too: appointments to make, home projects to tackle, work deadlines to finish, errands to run. I mean, hello, I haven't been to the dentist in a year. (It's possible it's been eighteen months; I am too afraid to check). Perhaps I'll finally get our budget under control and clean out the hall closet. And the kids' closets. And my closet. All of the closets. Come to think of it, maybe I could use this extra time to develop a completely different personality and finally become a responsible adult who actually meal plans?
I guess what I'm trying to say is I have no idea what I'm going to do with all this time.
I am overwhelmed by the possibilities.
***
My friend Alice and I had barely pulled out of the parking lot of the Marin French Flea Market when my car started beeping incessantly: alert, alert, low tire pressure!!! While the other three tires hovered around 36/37, the back left tire showed as 25. Me being me—which is to say a person who knows literally nothing about cars—asked Alice if we should be concerned.
Alice being Alice—which is to say a person who also does not know much about cars—shrugged nonchalantly. “I think it’s fine?”
Off we went. And all was fine, until that 25 turned to 24, to 23, to 22, to 21, and you see where I’m going with this. Alice quickly found a gas station less than a mile away, and reassured me it was right next to the Sonoma Raceway, so we’d probably be in good hands. More beeps. More alerts. My heart started beating a bit faster while I watched the tire pressure go down to 20, 19, 18, 17.
As it turns out, there was no gas station. There was only the Sonoma Raceway: a 2.52-mile road course and drag strip known for “heart-pounding motorsport excitement.” I may know nothing about cars, but I have heard of NASCAR, and this is where they race in California.
Meanwhile, the tire pressure had whittled down to 7.
When we pulled into the entrance, one of two security guards asked, “What brings you to the raceway today?”
I stuck my head out the window, looked back toward my tire, and asked the lady if it was flat. She followed my gaze and grimaced.
“Well, it’s not completely flat, but it’s about to be.”
Alice and I looked at each other and cringed.
"Is there anyone on the property who could help us?" I asked, "And if not, would it be okay if I just pull into the parking lot to call AAA?"
Before she even had a chance to respond, the other security guard—a man named Frankie—jumped in and offered to help. In a matter of minutes, he had whipped out a walkie talkie, called for back-up, hopped in a red truck and told us to follow him up to the maintenance deck. By the time I backed my car into the allotted spot, my tire pressure was down to 4. Right on cue, bippity boppity boo, a legit mechanic (wearing coveralls and everything!) appeared out of nowhere.
Alice and I got out of the car and watched helplessly as two generous men performed surgery on my tire in the blazing sun. They plugged the leak, filled the air back up, and told me my tire was good as new.
I thanked them half a dozen times, wishing I had cash or something else of value to offer them, but both men shrugged it off like it was nothing. Like we didn't completely interrupt their afternoon. Like they had all the time in the world.
***
My daughter is six years old and has just crossed the threshold into being "swim safe." She can now swim the length of an entire pool, a feat she's proud to show off to anyone who will watch. Still, though, she cannot hold her breath for very long. So she swims for two seconds, and then comes up for a tiny gasp of air. Swim. Gasp. Swim. Gasp. Swim. Gasp. In one trek across the pool, she comes up for air no less than 20 times.
I know I wasn't born knowing how to swim, but in my memory, that's how I remember it. I spent every summer in our backyard pool until my hair turned green and chlorine practically oozed out of my pores. As a kid, I loved to jump off the diving board and sink to the bottom, where I'd sit criss-cross applesauce on the pool floor, my dirty blond hair swirling all around me like a mermaid. I'd stay down there for as long as I could hold my breath—which was a long time—until finally, when I felt like my lungs were about to burst, I'd kick off like a rocket and shoot to the surface, gulping one gigantic, satisfying breath.
I am just now realizing that for the past thirteen years, I've been breathing in tiny little gasps: like every minute of the day needed to not just be accounted for, but also maximized so I could continue to work, and write, and keep the refrigerator stocked, and get everyone to where they needed to be, and and and … the list goes on.
For the past thirteen years, I have either been at home with a baby or a toddler, or both, or had a 12 p.m. school pick-up. My days have been structured in mere fragments of time, slivers of space where I have attempted to fulfill the roles of wife, mother, friend, business-owner, creative, house manager, carpool driver, and probably something else I can't even remember. I have spent the last thirteen years maximizing every twenty-minute window the way I used to confidently stack multiple plates of pasta up and down my arms when I waitressed in college. Look at me, I'm so good at cramming everything in! Look at me, I'm so good at carrying everything at once!
In more recent years, I've guarded my time like a bouncer outside a nightclub, deciding with one glance what did and did not deserve a second glance. I've been quick with my nos and stingy with my yeses. Some of those decisions have been wise—a good practice in boundary-setting after a lifetime of people-pleasing. But, and this is harder to admit, some of those decisions have been selfish, made out of a desperate attempt to simply have more time to myself.
For the entirety of my motherhood, time has felt elusive and finicky, like there was never enough of it. I tried to add hours to my days by waking up early to write and staying up late to relax, sacrificing sleep because that felt like the only viable option to make everything fit. I have been racing against the clock for over a decade, always clawing for more, more, more. More seconds. More minutes. More hours. MORE TIME. As if a giant hourglass sand timer sat taunting me in the middle of the house, reminding me how little I had left on any given day.
Sometimes it felt like we would never get here, but alas, here we are.
All of my children are in school—for more than six hours a day—and it feels like I am finally gliding through the water, rising to the surface, taking a gigantic gulp of air.
***
My kids have been in school for two weeks now and at the risk of sounding dramatic, I feel like a different person. It's not like all of my stress has magically melted away, or that I no longer have deadlines to adhere to, or family and work schedules to manage. It's more like time itself suddenly feels different: expansive where it used to feel compressed, abundant where it used to feel incomplete.
And because time feels different, I feel different. I feel ready to say yes, ready to be intentional and available to my kids, to my friends, to anyone at all. Case in point: when a mom in a local Facebook group posted about her 8th grade daughter wanting to learn how to shoot film, I immediately volunteered to mentor her. Before you're tempted to think I'm generous, let me be clear: for the past thirteen years, I would have scrolled right past that post and thought, "I don't have time for that."
While it's tempting to make a 37-item to-do list right now, to set fresh goals for my work and get a jump start on Christmas shopping and finally clean out closets or back up seven years' worth of photos, I'm feeling a divine nudge to think less about tasks and more about posture. Instead of pondering what I can accomplish with this newfound time and freedom, I'm wondering how I can better show up for the people in my life. What if instead of becoming more productive, I became more patient? Or, put another way, gloriously unhurried? What if instead of maximizing the extra hours in my day—as I am prone to do—I simply became more in tune with those around me? What if, like Frankie and the mechanic, I simply considered myself on standby: available, interruptible, always willing to lend a hand?
I'm still figuring out the logistics of this new schedule, this new reality for my days and weeks and months. But when I think back to that question of what I'm going to do with all this time, I'm realizing what I do in this new season isn't really what I want to focus on right now.
The better question I am learning to ask is who am I going to be with all this time?
Words and photo by Ashlee Gadd. Ashlee Gadd is a wife, mother of three, believer, and the founder of Coffee + Crumbs. When she's not working or vacuuming Cheerios out of the carpet, she loves making friends on the Internet, eating cereal for dinner, and rearranging bookshelves. Her book, Create Anyway: the Joy of Pursuing Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood, is available wherever books are sold. You can also keep up with her work on Substack.