keeping score

I do best when I'm not keeping track. When I'm not counting the minutes or the instances or the examples. I do best when I'm living in the moment and embracing it for what it is - whether it's a long session of nursing Alice, or when Chip and I are ever so slightly FRUSTRATED at each other over something totally insignificant.

Being the slightly (HA) methodical person that I am, it can be hard not to keep track of things. Somehow having a baby intensified this for me. I don't know if it's the same for other people, but once we had a baby there was a very palpable feeling of W-O-R-K around the house, and I'm ashamed to admit how easy it is to attempt to measure how many times a bathroom should be cleaned with soothing the baby - or doing the laundry with cooking dinner. I know, I know: THERE IS NO COMPARISON. How can there be? We can argue long and hard about importance or time or sheer physical strength each item requires, but still it leaves us feeling jilted, slighted, and (in the end) so horribly irritated that we're just working so much HARDER than someone else when the truth is... you might be. And you might not.

The real truth is that it doesn't matter. There is no point system for household duties. And even if there was, I don't think anyone would be happy with the outcome (you mean to tell me that cleaning a toilet is only worth 20 points????).

So I've been working on not looking at the clock, not counting, not measuring. It's made cooking somewhat scary (ha ha), but it's made life around here so much better.