It’s about time

A thread over at BlogHer got me thinking about how fortunate I am to be able to be home with my kids, and have them home with me. My sister doesn’t have that luxury. I know a lot of women choose to juggle out-of-the-house jobs and kids, and I know that lifestyle has its challenges, but they are challenges that come about by choice which must make them easier to deal with, right?

My sister, a single mom, has no choice; she has to work, and she therefore doesn’t get to spend much time with her daughter.

This makes me think about that BBC show Berkeley Square that aired on PBS several years ago. It was all about nannies in Edwardian London. I think it was Edwardian. Or was it Victorian? I’m trying to remember if there were any motorcars. Now it’s getting muddled up in my head with Upstairs/Downstairs. It doesn’t matter. The point it, there was one nanny who had a child of her own (secretly, or she would have lost her job). She was an Irish girl who got pregnant by the son of the lord of the manor, oh the scandal, and she left home and went to London with her baby and found lodgings with a nice Russian woman who took care of the baby for her all day. And that just killed me, thinking about this girl having to leave her own baby to go take care of other people’s children.

But that’s been going on forever, and it happens all the time today.

I am so lucky. Well, my religion says you shouldn’t say “lucky,” you should say “blessed.” Except I have a hard time with that, because why should I be more blessed than my sister? God loves us both the same. I guess I do think there is an element of luck at play in our lives—not a superstitious concept of luck but something for which there is no better name than the luck of the draw. I drew a pretty fine hand of cards. Did God stack the deck in my favor? Did I just make better decisions with the hand I was dealt?

Hmm, better than my sister, yes probably. But still.

Okay, yes, I did work hard to put myself in the position of getting to stay home with my children. And I have made sacrifices, choices, that make this work. Small house, frugal living, career on the back burner.

But still, but still.

One of my kids just bounced over and asked me to scratch a terrible awful itch in the middle of her back. I got to stop writing this and scratch her. And I knew it was a luxury, a great blessing, a high card for my royal flush.

Ain’t no bigger gift than time to just be together.