If time is relative, it’s never more so than when you’re a mom. For mom, a moment staring into a child’s eyes can last for an eternity … as can waiting at the doctor’s office with a croupy baby. Six years of grammar school can whiz by in what feels like a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks spent holding your breath, waiting for college acceptance letters, can feel like six years. Time plays lots of funny tricks on moms, but one of my favorites is the distortion of our perceptions around time for ourselves.

Before we have children, we have no appreciation for the time we have to ourselves. We take things like going to the supermarket (or the bathroom) alone for granted. We are hardly aware of the freedom and spontaneity that we enjoy when it comes to impromptu girls’ nights out or stopping on the way home from work for window shopping. We can’t really be blamed for our ignorance. We have no frame of reference to know otherwise.

When we start thinking about having a baby, we start paying attention to the lives of people we know who already have babies. We may notice their lack of social time, free time, personal time, in fact – any time except for kid time, BUT we assume that they are doing it all wrong. We never say it out loud, but we’re sure that our lives will be much more balanced and sane and civilized. Again, we can hardly be blamed for this grotesque exhibition of arrogance. We have no context – no sense of the reality of what it means to be a parent.

Then, we are pregnant. Reality begins to set in, but we view it through one of two sets of lenses, both of which offer delusion and distraction. On the one hand, we may be so blissed out that we hardly think about the implications of a baby on our personal time. The maternal chemicals have kicked in and we’re in full mommy mode – wearing our rose-colored glasses for all we’re worth. On the other hand, we may be so miserable that we can’t even think past the next few minutes (and whether we’re going to boot or not), never mind what will happen when the little bundle of joy comes home.

And then the little bundle of joy does come home, and we are suddenly plunged into life-as-a-parent. We are bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, and barely functioning. At this stage, the thought of time for ourselves is simultaneously a distant memory and a future concept about which we have grave doubts. Our baby is requiring every moment of our time and isn’t interested in negotiating.

Once junior hits the toddler years, we begin to feel human again. We may even start to experiment with getting a few “mommy moments” into our routine – maybe during nap time or on the odd Thursday out with friends. We coordinate play dates with other moms – more for our social lives than our children’s. The balance of kid time vs. mommy time is by no means hitting any kind of equilibrium, but we’re living in an almost ideal world where our children still see us as the center of the universe (after them, of course), and yet we can still get a few minutes here and there to try and remember what the heck we used to do when we had a few minutes here and there.

And then, our kids are in school. For some this means lots of extra “me time,” for others, it means a return to or continuation of work. Whatever your situation, there is some extra bandwidth in there for you to take a minute for yourself. Maybe on your commute, or (if you’re a SAHM) you can reconnect with friends without the kids. You get a breather, a new lease on life. You miss the little buggers when they’re away at their classes, but you kind of like having the ability to spend more than fifteen minutes without answering a dozen “why?” questions.

After that, the scales start to tip in the opposite direction. Where once you were begging your child, your partner, and the gods of parenting for “just five minutes to myself!!!” you are now trying to coerce that same five minutes out of your teen. Between a crazy academic and extracurricular schedule, busy social life, and thinly disguised disdain for anything remotely family oriented, you’re lucky to get a greeting in the morning and acknowledgment at the dinner table (assuming the child deigns to sit at the dinner table).

And then, time’s up.

Your sweet babe has up and grown. No longer tugging at your proverbial apron strings, no longer holding your hand, no longer even ignoring you across the dinner table. You child has left the nest, and you have all the time in the world to yourself. Only, now that you have it, it doesn’t seem half as appealing as it did when you couldn’t get two minutes alone to brush your teeth or sort the mail. Such is the relativity of mom time. The length of a moment depends entirely upon your perceptions, upon where your heart is.

Image  Credit: Terry Waller