Almost a defining moment
Sometimes light bulbs ‘ping’ in my head at the strangest moments.
Yesterday morning, while DD was at nursery, I had presisely 90 minutes to tidy up, do my Bodyrock.tv workout, go for a 30 minute run/walk, have a shower, slurp some cold coffee and get back to nursery to pick her up again without breaking the speed limit through the village. All was going well, I’d done parts one and two and was just opening the door to go for part three, the run/walk, when I realised there was already someone standing there. For a moment we looked at each other, me surprised that he was there and him suprised that I was. He had a parcel for next door, would I mind taking it? Of course not, but I’m in a bit of a hurry. All going well. Then he spoiled it.
‘You’re always in a rush, aren’t you luv?’ he said.
Now there are two parts to this rant. The first is that I don’t like being called ‘luv’ by a man. Or ‘hun’. Or ‘Mrs’. Which is strange as I use all three of those when I’m talking to my friends. Yes, double standards are alive and well in this house. When a man uses them I feel somehow belittled, talked down to. It bugs the hell out of me. When a gal says it to me, it feels like a term of affection. Warm and fuzzy. Clearly decades of female oppression rest uncomfortably in my genes. (Which is ironic as I squeezed into my small jeans yesterday and they were uncomfortable too.)
Part two of this rant is about being in a rush. You see Mr delivery chappie was right. I AM always in a rush. A perpetual treadmill of rushing from one thing to the next. It drives OH fruit-loopy. ‘You’ve got to slow down to speed up,’ he says wisely. I can’t hear him over the wind whistling in my ears as I blast past. I rush from this activity to that activity, from nap time to workout time, from quick blog post to speedy Tweet. I’m dipping my toe in more ponds than Kermit the frog. And I don’t even have a job.
So that lightbulb I mentioned at the beginnning? This is where it ‘pinged’. I need to slow down. I need to do less. I need to be strict with myself about what I do and when I do it. I need to not spend time Tweeting when I should be preparing to leave the house in 5 minutes, or reading just one more blog post when I should be running DD’s bath. I know this.
It was almost a defining moment for me. Then the lightbulb ‘popped’, everything went dark in my head again and I was too busy running out the door for my run/walk to replace it. *Sigh*
