Getting to know me

I get approximately 1 hour and 25 minutes to myself 3 times a week. (Not counting the evenings that I'm still awake after the kids are in bed, house picked up, and Chris home and debriefed from class.)And of course there are moments sprinkled throughout (like when I hide in bathrooms), but this is the undisturbed silent me time...rare, valuable.

Now, this is if I get Ella to preschool at the earliest time possible and rush home without traffic and get Sophie into bed by 1:05. If it goes that smoothly, I have time before Aidan gets home at 2:30 (if he gets distracted a minute or two by the older boys jumping from the monkey bars to the nearby tree branches.)When he first told me of this I felt compelled to remind him how stupid and dangerous that was and get a sense for how their behavior might be rubbing off on him. Now I welcome the extra 2 minutes.

However, before "my time" begins I'm one of those neat freaks that has to have the clutter put away or I can't relax. And I have to brew a fresh cup of coffee, left over from the morning pot is intolerable. And I've even been known to put on my blue frame, mildly prescribed glasses if the hair and outfit are right. All this for atmosphere.

It's been years since I've been able to control my atmosphere. In Turkey, on the days I had a babysitter come, I needed to leave the house for the kids to really play with her. Finding a quiet place was virtually impossible and on the rare occasion that I did, it was so unusual for someone to be anywhere alone, just reading, that I was stared at for my oddity. Once I found an outdoor cafe on the highest spot in Istanbul. With breathtaking views of the city I could ignore the fact that cats were congregating around me, men were lurking with cay glasses behind, and I could see my breath. Only in the dead of winter is any outdoor cafe in Istanbul quiet.

So, now enabled to control my environment, I'm kind of a nazi about it.

No phone calls, no dinner prep, no laundry. God gets 45 minutes and my body gets 30. That's it for the week: total = God 135 minutes, health 90 minutes. If this happens, I find that I'm mostly able to survive the other 9855 minutes of the week.

My plan leaves 10 minutes 3 times a week to deal with random interruptions that need to be attended to in daytime hours (without a screeching toddler pulling on my pants, "ma mam!") You can see where I'm going with being a nazi and in a time crunch.

Bringing us to this week.

It's not reverse culture shock. I'm accustomed to the long waits while on hold, the Indian accent on the other end, the red tape of American systems. But I'm new to dealing with the health care system. And let's just say, it's not fitting in to my allocated 10 minutes, 3 times a week.

I could actually write a whole lot more and I know this is all very anti-climatic, but hey, my time is up!