Sandy sheets

My husband is an incredibly conscientious person. He has always lived his life in this way - that as you take on new responsibilities, you must make sure that the existing ones are met first, and only after careful consideration can you let go of one responsibility in order to fill a more important one. I have always admired this about him and have tried to emulate his way of life. But what I am starting to realize is that this way of life is incredibly difficult to lead in families where both parents are passionate about their work.

In my husband's family, his father went to work for the civil service, had lots of vacation time, a long lunch every day, and came home at 5 each day. His mother had to give up her career as soon as she was married. She spent her life raising five children (all of whom have turned out to be great people). Each night when Paddy came home, he would take the children so that Nora could make the dinner in peace. After dinner, he would do the dishes with the children, while Nora could do something else on her own, like listening to the news and ironing the clothes. There was a balance to this life, a security that meant that everything would get done at a certain pace in a very predictable manner.

The women in my family have always worked. They have also raised the children mostly on their own. I am not by any means like these women. I have a supportive husband who gives all that he can to me and Amelia. But still, there is something tricky about juggling the two passions of home and career that seem to be capable of 'bumping' into each other at any given moment. And lately I have been trying to uncover that magical equation that enabled the women in my family to juggle so much more than seemingly possible.

Yesterday morning, waking up with my daughter asleep on my head, I had this flashback to my grandmother's house, that sensation of climbing into any given bed at any given time (we often rotated depending on who was living and/or visiting the house), and that strange sensation of rolling sand as your feet made their way down to the bottom of the covers. Sandy sheets. My grandmother rarely, if ever, changed the sheets in the various bedrooms. All through the summer, the sheets were covered in sand. The memories are so vivid, the smell of ivory soap mixed with ocean, sand, and the many heads that laid on that same pillow in any given summer month.

In the modern family, we try and keep everything ticking along by formulating some sort of 'priority' system - almost like our own in-house bug tracking system. Critical bugs are taken care-of immediately, like a sick child or a family crisis. High bugs get sorted in service packs (almost seasonal) - like work deadlines, school transitions. Maintenance tasks that we take on at the end of the day, washing the dishes, taking out the trash, and cleaning the sheets. I have often found great satisfaction in those things labeled as 'maintenance' - the assurance that no matter what else was left undone, I could successfully clean the kitchen. But when things seem to get squished, it is the maintenance tasks that annoy me the most. And there is something comforting in observing the cracks in the domestic space of the women in my life - their ability to push against a priority system in their worlds that did not match the way they wanted to (or perhaps were able to) live their own lives.