A Hundred Things to Do on a Saturday
“What have you got to do today?” Howard asked me first thing in the morning. He was headed for the shower and knew that his day was full of completing the last pieces for The Body Politic. There were words to write and pictures to draw; he was the one who had to do it.
“I don’t know.” I answered, not because I lacked for things to do, but because on a Saturday morning when I’ve finally cracked my eyes open, the one day a week when I get to sleep late, my brain does not immediately present me with my list of things that must be done. Truthfully I doesn’t on the other days either, but there are auto-pilot patterns to follow until my brain comes online with a plan for the day.
I am tired, worn from being the keeper of the schedule all week long. I track all my people, all their appointments, many of their tasks. I track more than I should, but it takes conscious effort for me to let go of things once my brain has flagged them as important or as likely to turn into a crisis if they aren’t managed well. On Saturday my alarm does not go off. Instead I lay in bed until my eyes open of their own accord. I’d like to spend the whole day free of assignments, but the week spills over and the weekend becomes the time when we do all the things that there was not time to do on the other days. For the past several weeks my Saturdays have been full of events and appointments, today was blissfully clear, a blank square on the calendar. It meant that my approach to the day could be free form instead of focused.
In the end I worked harder today than I have on many of the weekdays. I wrangled the kids into doing housework and I did a lot of it myself. The clean clothes are tucked safely into drawers instead of heaped in baskets. Rooms got vacuumed and I removed bags of trash from various corners of bedrooms. At one point Gleek complained about my decree that screens were to stay off until noon. “But Mom, if we all work until noon there won’t be any work left to do.” I wish child. The more I clean up, the more I can see that still needs to be organized. I could use a half dozen more Saturdays all in a row. I don’t get them. Not for quite a while. Summer will provide an unending stream of Saturday-like days during which my kids will need to do more housework. They’ll also be in the house making messes far more frequently. And there will be the influx of lunches to make.
Before we embarked on all of the cleaning, I put a reward at the end of it. I bought tickets for us all to go see Iron Man 3. It was a worthy reward and a nice way to end the day. Now the kids are in bed and I’m sitting on the couch alternately pondering plot points from the movie and all the things I’d still like to accomplish in my house. When Monday comes we’ll be back to school and business priorities. Someday I’ll get the flowerbeds weeded and the trim painted for our front room, but probably not this week.
Next Saturday I’ll be at LDS Storymakers conference. It is an event that I enjoy, but I’ll confess that I’ll miss having a free Saturday. This one was so very nice.