My Complicated Relationship With Not Being A “Busy” Mom

I’m not that busy. Really. Even when I was in the thick of things raising toddlers, I wasn’t all that busy. I pretended I was; I could bustle around with the best of them. It felt like what was required of me, proof that I was. Years ago I mastered the art of looking busy so no one would ask me to do something that might make me actually busy. When I worked in restaurants I carried around a decoy spray bottle so I could quickly wipe down a table if a manager walked b,y even though really I was just gossipping with the other servers. As a kid, I always needed to use the bathroom when it was time to do the dishes at Christmas or Thanksgiving, timing it perfectly every time. I grew out of excuses to get out of being busy because I became a mom of four, but I never grew out of not wanting to be busy.

Sometimes I think being busy is just about the saddest thing a person can be. I hear it all the time, “I’m so busy.” “It’s been crazy busy these last few months.” ”I can’t get over how busy we’ve all been.” I hear it from people who are actually busy but also people who seem to me to be afraid not to be busy. Afraid that if someone asked them, “So how are things?” and they said, “Pretty good, I just spent two hours watching it snow,” that person would think they weren’t doing their life right. That they aren’t doing enough, or worse that their life has not been filled up enough with friends and careers and family and they’ve just been sort of left behind. A long weekend where you’re not complaining about all the parties you have to go to? A Tuesday morning without six Zoom meetings and three calls from your mother? No? So… what the hell is the point of you?

So I would make myself look exhausted at school pick-up, make my eyes do that shifting around thing like ‘What’s next? Hurry!’ and since I was a single mother of four boys, everyone believed me.

I’m a snow-watcher from way back, but I used to lie about it all the time in case people wondered what was the point of me. There were afternoons when the kids were in school and I had finished enough of the stuff that kept us going (the laundry, the cooking, the working I did so we could pay for clothes and food) and I’d think, okay I’ll just stare outside for a while. I would make myself a tea and watch it snow. Or go to my local library and sit by their fireplace and read Little Women or something by Alice Munro to fill my cup. I never told anyone, certainly not the other moms at the school who were busy-so-busy-all-the-time-busy. And they really were, I could tell. They looked so very important to me, and a part of me was embarrassed by how easily I could stop being busy. How life could drift on past me and no one would notice because I wasn’t on the busy track with them. So I would make myself look exhausted at school pick-up, make my eyes do that shifting around thing like “What’s next? Hurry!” and since I was a single mother of four boys, everyone believed me.

Nevertheless, it was the same when the boys came home from school every day. We didn’t really know anyone. We had more nights of just going to the park or walking to the corner store to get ice cream, of me sitting on the front porch watching them throw a football up and down the road, of playing hide and seek with flashlights in the forest at dusk, than we did actual plans. I think part of it was that we moved to a new town after my divorce and I didn’t make friends to keep me busy. Plus we couldn’t afford all of the busy-making kids’ activities and lessons so we just had to hang out on the sidelines together. It was a habit that stuck for all of us.

I could be busier now but I’m still not into it. I work and have friends and my adult kids and keep my little place reasonably clean but somehow, somehow I’m just not that busy. Never so busy that I can’t play pickle ball for three hours on a Thursday evening, or go for a walk. Or watch too much television. You would be sad for me if I told you how much television I can happily consume and still feel like I’m living a life.

Saying you’re busy is basically the same thing as saying you’re popular. That’s bad news for me.

I know people whose kids are grown, who were positive that they would only be busy in those early years, but busy became a habit for them, a personality, and they don’t know how to stop doing it. Like one of those actors who puts on a British accent to seem posh and then they forget how to talk in their normal voice. It’s the same. Like walking on a treadmill with only one speed and that speed is fast! Go! Hurry!

It’s kind of a cult, being busy. It’s an aspiration. It’s the whole point. I think once you join the cult of busy you can’t stop. You don’t want to be the person sitting in a group who says “not much” when someone asks what you did on the weekend. You want to make jokes about how you need a weekend from your weekend because it’s just go, go, go and you’re exhausted. Saying you’re busy is basically the same thing as saying you’re popular. That’s bad news for me.

It’s okay to be busy (of course it is!) but I just want to tell you that you don’t owe it to anyone to make yourself busy. That when you have your little baby and you want to just sit and look at their fingers for an hour or so, that’s fine. If you want to take a nap while your toddler goes to preschool instead of running to the grocery store, it’s fine. If you want to float on a river with your kids for a weekend and eat salty french fries for dinner and all of you go to bed with sun tight skin and sand on your feet, fine. Great, in fact. Because you’re teaching them how to breathe in a moment of nothingness. You’re teaching yourself too. And trust me, not being busy isn’t the worst.