The Washington Post recently ran an article talking about leisure time – as studied by an expert, and written by a working mom (I know, I know, all moms are working moms) who had no leisure time. In fact, in order to prove she had no leisure time she volunteered to be a part of a study on leisure time and it took her about a year to find the time to do the study.

Here is a link to the whole article.

I read the article, I read the comments, even read reaction by another blogger, Marissa Levin, who writes for the Examiner (here).

My thoughts come at a time when I’m trying to work on controlling my temper – in my continuous drive towards self-perfection (ha!) It’s actually because I know I yell to much, especially when my 6 year old mini-me runs around bellowing as well. It all got reinforced by my mom who wrote me a note to pull it together after I yelled at Christmas (this after YEARS AND YEARS of blaming Christmas conflict on my sister, who was absent this year – but who to be honest is the usual source of conflict. Just kidding).

So in this temper-control mode I know that I have to make sure I’m not working too much. Because that is when I get stressed and yell. Especially since my stated goal is to be around to spend time with my kids – and the article here raises an interesting point. It mentions that over the years we are not spending LESS time with our kids – in fact, we probably spend more. I know for me, I am constantly stopping what I’m doing to play Go Fish or Crazy Eights or watch an Annie show. My mom didn’t do this as much – we played on our own more (and could, out in the yard, unsupervised, without the marauding band of kidnappers that we fear are out there today). I told my twins today, in fact, the the benefit of having a twin sister was that they always had someone to play cards with and they looked at me blankly, then played half a game before one threw all the cards at the other.

Obviously a big part of the leisure time thing is choosing that time and also defining what is leisure time. If you’re “doing work” but on facebook for an hour (I would NEVER do that) is that work? Or if, just as an example, you were hypothetically my husband and at work emailing your friends for 2 or so hours about football, The Sports Guy, Jersey Shore, and then playing Mafia Wars on facebook – is that leisure time? Should it be counted as so?

All right, also, another thought I had (these are more “thoughts” on the article than a well-organized response) is I know, personally, I need to a, develop a hobby and then b, do the hobby. That would be qualified leisure time. But in the interim I’m fitting it in, and while sometimes that means extra stress, I know that I’m not able to sit restfully and watch television (I can’t watch Jersey Shore restfully or not restfully) without doing something…knitting, working on the computer, reading, something. So does that mean it’s not leisure time? To me, it is, and I’m still able to sort-of relax. Should I be dedicating time to doing nothing or only things I wish? Sure, I guess, but I feel lazy when I do that. I’m better busy; I guess the balance is “busy” vs “too busy” and that is a slippery slope.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.