Most mornings for eons in my mummy life I would hear "Mum, Mum, can’t find this, where’s that" etc, yet it seems to become uncannily far more urgent when I am trying to have a shower! Barging in on my shower as if when mums not available everything becomes a critical emergency that just can't seem to wait. The shower is supposed to be my 'me' time, my daily maintenance body cleaning time, for goodness sakes, I'm naked here! Though the kids don't care what I look like, as long as I am available to divert any crisis that arises in the nanosecond I step with all my vulnerability into the shower.
Of course if the role was reversed, I walked in on them having a shower I would be met with a blatant scowl of "Muuuuuuum, I am having a shower here! helllllllllo!!"
One morning when Ritch barged in with my purse, for me to get the money out for a school event, with my wet hands, I said, "isn't the bus leaving in well over an hour? couldn't you have waited another 2 minutes?"
Ritch made cute sign in woodwork for me after a frantic morning of lost socks, uniforms & recorders. It said
“Attention
The Mum depart is closed for daily body maintenance.
Please hold all questions, queries & crisis until depart is open again.
Approx wait 10 minutes.”
I chuckled as he hung the sign on the bathroom door. The next morning no one barged in, no frantic knocking at the door, no nothing, that is until I opened the door. There they stood in a curved row, an onslaught ensued, maybe they had the notion, that the first in was going to be answered most civilly.
The next day I took my time getting dressed. I opened the door carefully to find no one, looking left, looking right, there was no one, it was was strangely quiet. Blinking away a confused thought, that maybe I had opened the door to an alternate reality it was that odd, unusual. I start to tip toe towards my bedroom when Ritch calls out “mum I couldn’t find my socks” but before my shoulders could fully slump he adds that its ok he found them in the sock drawer.
The next morning, I did the same, I took my time getting dressed. I even thought about blow drying my hair. Again no one there as I opened the door, with a cheesy Cheshire smile and an even cheekier thought, thinking that I might make this a habit, nice smooth hassle, crisis free mornings. With me not being on call, they continued to solve their own problems.
My sister in law Janey who is a Faculty head at our local Tafe had the same problem but with her staff. Every morning as she raced up the stairs, she was greeted with some sort of catastrophic crisis, mostly multiple ones from her teachers. Every morning was spent dealing with them, which left precious little time to do what she really needed to do. Work came home; projects left abandoned until one day her car broke down on the way to work.
More than an hour late she arrived. No one was waiting at the top of the stairs; no one was waiting in the office. This morning she actually got started on some of the necessary projects that would need to be submitted very soon. Lunchtime came and the conversation was centered on how much trouble there had been and how it was fixed. Janey thought there is some thing to this, and the next day she arrived deliberately late; late enough for all the teachers to be already in class. Janey had accomplished quite a great deal that day. From then on she starts her day after classes start, the incidences of problems also vanished in a short time. Though Janey leaves later and puts in the same hours, she now accomplishes more, much, much more. Having gone to various time management seminars previously and being quite a discipline stalwart, she still couldn’t draw enough hours out of the day. All along it wasn’t time management that was needed, but system management.
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