“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” – Seth Godin

Nearly every afternoon I’m sitting on the sofa, recovering from the morning, while my kids have quiet time. Whenever we are at home, we have almost two hours where they do quiet activities in their rooms while I rest downstairs.

My big girls have taken to planning and implementing a curriculum for the littles during this time: they read poetry, art books, and stories, and the littles complete worksheets the girls have made for them with questions like, “What type of bird is this?” next to a drawing of a bird, or “What color comes after orange?” with a rainbow drawn next to it.

Sometimes quiet time is quiet, and other times I spend too much of it going up and down the stairs asking someone to stop screaming, or stop kicking the wall, or stop jumping off the furniture. Sometimes I’m so tired and it’s so quiet, I manage to fall asleep.

The golden hour of afternoon sunlight coincides with quiet time at this time of year. We often don’t start until close to two, and so the time stretches toward four, and the sunlight passes by the windows and makes everything glow.

I have a couple of auto-immune things going on, if having so many kids weren’t enough to knock one out halfway through the day. I wanted my doctor to tell me there was hope that someday I wouldn’t need two hours of rest in the middle of every day in addition to the eight or nine hours I have every night. It feels like too much down time.

He said the fatigue is totally normal. There’s not a magic pill for it.

It still feels like a lost opportunity. It’s the only time of day when light shines in that way. It’s perfect for taking photos. But most of the time, I’m just laying there, feeling like I should be doing something- anything more productive than being glued to the sofa.

I don’t know if this is a season, or if two hours of quiet time is something I’ll still need after my last kid leaves for college. I try to make it fit into a box that looked appealing – the self care box, or the maintaining sanity box. But there is so much I feel like I need to do in a day to maintain my own standards and sometimes just stay afloat, that it’s hard to file quiet time in a way that doesn’t make it seem superfluous.

I think probably older me will look back on this with some kind of perspective, and hopefully compassion. I know I need the time – I have tried to do without it, and it wasn’t pretty.

I also know there are lots of other lifestyle changes I could make that might help – eliminating sugar, going to bed earlier and waking up earlier, more exercise, more reading, but I have been unable or unwilling to make those changes yet, so quiet time it is.

And as I sit on the sofa watching a Masterpiece historical drama while I eat my lunch, I’ll watch the sun make everything luminous, and try not to think about all the other things that I could be doing.