As a child, I often heard older people say how time flies. Yet, as I waited for school to be out on Friday afternoon, it seemed as if time passed incredibly slowly. Monday creeped into Tuesday, while Tuesday crawled into Wednesday and on to the end of the week. Time raced only on the weekend.
It didn’t get better in young adulthood, although the timeframes became longer. My husband and I no longer ached for weekends; rather we banked our hopes on forthcoming holidays or accumulating vacation time so that we could take road trips to rev our engines.
When children arrived, time acquired a different calendar. Now we became aware of the September school bell and distributed our lives around it, like moths to flame. We took short vacations at Thanksgiving, longer ones at Christmas, and the longest of all during summer break. Just like everyone else.
Now, my children are in their thirties, which means I am middle aged, even under the kindest of colloquialisms. I don’t long for Fridays or hearken to a school bell, nor have I done so for years. At the same time, I find there are still time constraints. They are of the energy kind. I have all the time in the world in one respect, but can’t do as much with it as I could when I waited for that Friday school bell. I only wish someone would have alerted me to this when I was young and eager.
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