Someone asked me recently, “So what do you do in your free time?”

I responded, “Well, we do the laundry, we go to the supermarket for groceries…”

“So it’s not free time after all,” the person replied.

“Well, it’s free in the sense that it’s not spent for work,” I hastily added. No sooner had the words left my mouth did I realize how funny it sounded. When we say free time, do we only mean that we’re not at work? But household work is still work, isn’t it?

After talking about this a bit, we both agreed that sometimes we really tend to be more tired during the weekends than during weekdays because of the tonloads of household chores that we have to do. In our case, for example, we never really get to do our laundry except for weekends, and even if there’s just three of us, that usually means a gigantic pile of stinking laundry by Friday. And that’s why you can find me cursing during the weekends when the weather is not cooperating. How else can I get the laundry to dry? That means more piles the following weekend. Ugh.

And it’s not just the laundry, mind you. Weekends also mean cleaning the house, cleaning up our toddler’s mess, sorting through the mails, going out for groceries, running for errands, and what-have-you. There is just so much to do; more often than not we wonder just where the heck our weekend goes. Unlike in the Philippines, we don’t have household help or relatives we can holler to for help. Sometimes I do envy my sister back home, who has a household helper and a nanny who looks after her own toddler. She also works full-time. Ah, the perks of living in the third world. Here, I join the ranks of women who epitomize the “working mother” – the work never ends even when I get home. There is no one else I can turn to for help, no one else to clean up after our mess (unless of course my Mom is visiting hehe). And like them, I have to make compromises, too. The house won’t always be clean, the dirty laundry basket won’t always be empty, and sometimes the mess will not be cleaned up for several days at a time. It just can’t be done, given the limited time. And admittedly, sometimes I would rather just blog here than bother with a few messy areas in the house. I can live with that; a little mess never hurt anybody. 🙂

Last weekend, the sun was out in full force, it really just seemed so cruel if we didn’t go out and at least enjoy it while it lasts (nowadays it gets pretty dark by 5 pm, what a bummer). So we just dropped everything that we were doing, packed the previous night’s leftover adobo into our lunch boxes, packed Aya’s bike into the car’s trunk, and headed off to the park. There, we brought out our hastily prepared picnic food, lounged lazily under the sun, enjoyed the cool afternoon breeze and watched the leaves from the trees fall. Aya rode her bike, and showed off how fast her little bike can go. Father and daughter frolicked on the grass like pups out in the sun for the first time. I stretched out my legs and closed my eyes, thought of how wonderful it is to just spend time without any hurries or any particular purpose in mind. When I opened my eyes, the sky was a little bluer, the sun a little bit brighter, and I swear that I felt a renewed vigor for everything that lies ahead (mga labada humanda kayo!).

Free time is not what’s left over after all our chores are done; it’s the time we simply have to make for ourselves, before anything else.