Fragmented mind

I have a scientist friend who currently does some heavy-duty technical writing from home ten hours a week. She also has two elementary school age children. We were chatting the other day, and she was telling me how surprisingly hard it is to find ten hours a week to concentrate. In theory it should be easy, just two hours a day. But finding two consecutive and uninterrupted quiet hours for concentration at home every day is quite the challenge. And that's with both of her kids in school. Mind you, she wasn't complaining. She was just stating what she has found to be true in her life.

I was nodding my head in agreement. Vigorously.

Now, I do not have any employment requiring me concentrate at home. But I have often wondered why, since having kids, my mind seems so frazzled and frayed. Right now (for first the first time in five and a half years) I can't blame it on sleep-deprivation. (Hooray! It's true--I'm not sleep-deprived!) But my brain still seems a bit (a lot!) on the mushy side. Why?....I just can't bring myself to believe that motherhood has actually made me stupider....

I think that motherhood has not changed my mind, but it has changed my time. My time is much, much more fragmented now. This fragmentation means that I don't often have long stretching periods of time to really concentrate on a task. I am a slow, methodical person. So not having time (as in several consecutive hours to work on a project, or meditate on and study out a problem, or write something coherent and thoughtful) takes its toll on my life (and my feelings of accomplishment). It also takes its toll on my mind because I get so out of practice concentrating that finally given the opportunity it takes extra long to get the old brain cranking away. (Sometimes when I go to the temple, and have two hours of quiet meditation, I almost start panicking because I can't remember how to be alone with my own mind for two hours straight! It's kind of like meeting an old friend you haven't seen in a while.)

The problem isn't that I don't have time. At this stage of life, we are not frantically busy. I can't pretend that I'm one of those people who is super busy and has to be twelve places at once. I'm not. I have plenty of free time. The problem is that it's fragmented. It's divvied up into little chunks here or there. For me, I'd like to use that "free time" for a million different home organization projects (which are desperately needed), more thoughtful blog posts, or....well, if I ever had more than five minutes to think about it, I'm sure I could come up with something else I'd like to do with huge chucks of unscheduled time. So even though I have a fair amount of free time, it is inefficient time, time frittered away in 20 minutes chunks.

Like the friend I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I'm not complaining. Promise! I'm just stating what seems to be true in my life. I have the fragmented mind of a mother. And I'm not sure I see the situation changing anytime soon.

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Hmmm. I am suddenly feeling inspired to record my schedule for a typical week. Maybe I'll do that. But not right now. I have 13 important minutes to fritter away uselessly before I have to be somewhere.