Nobody Told Me Free Time Was This Weird
My childhood friend and her husband came over after one of my comedy shows recently. Her husband, like mine, has learned to just go along with whatever strange plan his wife has created and hope there are snacks.
We were sitting in my living room, which was clean for the first time in a long time—because apparently, transitioning out of a full-time church job is when I deep clean every room in the house and garage using cleaning supplies I didn’t know I had… and a label maker.
That is how “relaxed” I am now.
We sat in my clean living room, surrounded by the evidence of my new, slower pace, and I tried to explain that I was having a hard time with all this open space.
And by open space, I mean I had deep cleaned the garage as well as the house, listened to two audiobooks, planned and performed a comedy show, planned my seven-year-old’s birthday party, hosted friends and family, and still felt like I was getting away with something.
I told her, “I think I’m uncomfortable because I only have about 80 hours a week of responsibility now.”
She understood immediately.
That is the problem with having friends from the same ambitious, small-town ecosystem: you say something clinically concerning, and they nod like you just described the weather.
We grew up around women who did everything. They ran the programs, planned the events, remembered everyone’s allergies, stayed late, showed up early, organized the volunteers, made the phone calls, and still apologized because the napkins didn’t match the liturgical season.
My friend and I are the next generation, so we are very modern about it. If someone is having a hard week, we don’t show up with a casserole. We send them the vacation plan we created during our last perimenopause sleepless night.
This is care now. A road trip with options.
My friend and I do not plan vacations like normal people. Normal people say, “Should we go to the Grand Canyon?”
We say, “Could we do the Grand Canyon and Disneyland in the same road trip, or would that make the children unionize?”
Then comes the bathroom-break math, which is where family vacation planning becomes a moral crisis. Every stop is technically twelve minutes, but with children, it becomes forty-three. Someone has to pee, someone else suddenly doesn’t, someone needs a snack, someone can’t find their shoe.
So we ask the hard questions:
Can we teach the kids to pee in Gatorade bottles?
Or is it better to go with total dehydration?
These are the things my friend and I discuss when we are “relaxing.”
The strange part is that I wanted this. I wanted more room. I wanted to not be sprinting from one responsibility to another. I wanted fewer meetings, fewer emails, fewer people needing me to know where the extra chairs were.
And now that I have a little more room, I keep looking at it suspiciously.
Like it might be a trick. Like the blank space on the calendar is not peace, but a raccoon in the garage—I don’t know what it wants, but I know I can’t just leave it there.
By the end of the night, our husbands had survived another evening of being married to women with plans. My living room was still clean. My friend had gotten out of the house. I had gotten to tell jokes into a microphone.
Who knows what next week will bring.
— Sheila
