The other mother at the pool reclines in her bathing suit. She reads a magazine, often looking up to engage with her children in the pool. Other times there have been more people, today it is just me and her with four children in the water. I sit in the shade, fully clothed. My laptop is open and I type. I don’t don’t know if she is judging me for the choices I display. It hardly matters. My imagination supplies judgement for her, giving her a critical voice. I am obviously a workaholic who can not leave her computer at home. Or I am the disengaged mother, more interested in updating facebook than spending time with my kids. She has no way to see that I am a writer. I’m stealing this time to craft stories, because all writing time is stolen from something else. Each moment I am aware of what I neglect.
Along with the guilt for not treasuring each splashing moment with my children is the litany of how I should write differently. If I write fiction, I’m aware of the blog post that did not happen. If I blog then some part of me mourns the fiction time. Then there is the incessant knowledge that I ought to write more letters to my Grandmother, my daughter at college, my parents, siblings, friends. My head is so noisy with self-judgements, it is a wonder that I can find words at all.
That tanned mother on her lounge chair with her magazine likely has no thoughts about me, other than to tell herself what I think of her. So young mother across the pool, enjoy your quiet hour, because motherhood does not often supply hours when the kids are happy and need nothing. They can entertain each other for a time, my kids and yours, while you read words and I create them.
Opportunity cost can sometimes paralyze me because it seems too high to cope with. Usually after being paralyzed I realize the high cost stems from the fallacy of thinking that the cost of choosing one thing is sum of giving up all the other things. This is usually false. I can generally only do one (or depending what they are, a limited set) of the other things anyway. So the true ‘cost’ is only the cost of the next most desirable choice. Sometimes remembering this helps.
Other times I can yank myself out of guilty second guessing of choices by telling myself that a thing worse than choosing one thing over another desirable thing is to then not enjoy my choice because I was thinking about the other options that I skipped. I must be something of an engineer through and through because even the snarky voices in the back of my head dislike that inefficiency enough that they shut up and let me focus.
Hope you can find your key thoughts to locking the critical voices out so they can’t spoil any enjoyment to be had in the choice you chose.