Some thoughts about our Labors

Happy Labor Day to you all. How are you spending the day?

This holiday, which has never made much sense to me, was always a weekend for a big home improvement project when I was a kid. My father would say "it's a time for Labor after all." He was also fond of saying that the main reason to have kids was so you had little workers. So.

Actually, all weekends featured more work than play for my family-of-origin. Our "play" was also a lot of work - my parents ran a community Gilbert and Sullivan theater group, staging 3-4 of the operettas a year. Saturday? Costume or set construction. Sunday? Rehearsals. Once the show was going? A month of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday performances. We were in the shows. We were the stage manager. We were the house manager. We baked all the cookies and brownies that were sold at the concession.

It wasn't until I could drive myself that I found another way to spend a weekend, and tellingly, my escape into a weekend of my own choosing was to volunteer for hiking trail work parties - yes, I went hiking, but I was hauling along tools and a hardhat. My fun was still a lot of work.

I still don't really know how to treat a weekend, and it's made harder by the fact that my husband would love to just sit and chill all weekend long. That's after he sleeps in both days, of course.

Just chillin - or anything that is mostly sitting around - makes me very uncomfortable. I start to get twitchy. I start to feel bad about myself, like I can physically feel myself spreading and turning into a blob of pudding. Inside, my inner child is glancing around nervously, afraid that one of my parents will catch me "doing nothing" and yell at me before they give me an even worse job to do.

It's obviously a balance that I need. All work and no play does make Sara a dull girl, and a worn out, tired, and sick one too. All play and no work would most likely result in chaos, as there are many dimensions of my life that require my focus and my work. Not only that, but I just couldn't do it - I really really couldn't.

I'm trying to frame some of my downtime as "puttering". I am encouraging myself to take the time without a To Do list, without a plan, and then to just do stuff as I am moved to in the moment. So far, "puttering time" has been filled with painting house trim, cleaning out closets, washing windows, weeding gardens, and pulling kids outside toys out of the margins of the yard and cleaning them up before storage/donation. My husband's comment was that puttering for me apparently means working just as hard as usual, but not asking for any help. It needs a bit more tweaking.

So, once again, happy Labor Day to you all. May your labors be light, and your play be sweet. And may we all find a balance point between the two.