Skip to main content

5 minutes

What I have learned recently is that even though my nine year old daughter can now set the timer on the microwave if needed and can read time on a clock, her sense of internal time has not yet calcified.

More or less, I can, at this stage in my life, approximate 5 minutes.  I set the timer for my tea to steep and walk away. When something inside me tells me to, I head back to get it, and the timer dings on my way.

We wait for approximately 5 minutes at a customer service counter and my daughter is unbelieving how long it took to get served.  "It was like 40 minutes Mom!"

Partly, she was bored and when we are bored all time denatures into jelly, but partly she had no idea approximately how much time she had spent looking at brochures while we waited for them to process our return.

Ever since both kids have entered the school system, their grip on time has tightened. Our daughter corrects me on a regular basis when it comes to time, my son still relies on us to clarify if this is a Monday or a Wednesday.  What is more important to him is knowing if it is gym day or not. His metric for time is how many nights to Hallowe'en or a birthday party.

Although I have not worn a watch for years, I have been conditioned by years of school and clock watching at jobs and breastfeeding and childcare and waiting for buses and cell phones to know a 5 minutes when I feel it.  How would things be different if I didn't.

My daughter still believes a lot (anything) can happen in 5 minutes, I have parceled my time up. A 5 minute parcel is for steeping tea, enough time to eat a piece of toast and find some underware.  Now that the time has been divided up, it is nearly impossible to not know what 5 minutes feels like.


 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I entered August without you.

 I won't visit you this month.  You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you.   I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.
1 comment
Read more

Fists full of lettuce

 It is a pot of a variety of lettuce plants. It was planted by my mom.  She has been living with Stage 4 bile duct cancer for at least 1.5 years (that we know of, probably a lot longer).  Standing and gardening are becoming harder as time goes on. She learned about gardening from her dad as a kid and kept on gardening every year of her adult life.  Sometimes the gardens were tiny or rudimentary, but with the help of my dad , they have become major and, at times elaborate, growing projects over the years.  Now it is a collection of raised beds and regular beds that hold a host of plants, vegetable and flowers. Something that was clear that first spring with Stage 4 cancer is that gardening would continue in a big way, cancer or no cancer.  It was important to order the seeds and start them inside and get them planted outside, no matter what. Spending time together in the summer with cancer now consistently involves gardening and following instructions. Plant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still.   We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue.  Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision.  They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped.  Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...
1 comment
Read more