Then came colic. Night after night, cuddles were met with blood curdling screams, each one more enigmatic than the last.

Yet by all reasonable standards, she was completely fine: her diaper was dry. She just ate. There was no sign of reflux. She’d just woken from sleep. Nevertheless, every night, for weeks, my daughter continued to cry, typically from the hours of 10 PM to 2 AM.

At the time, I was in my third year of my pediatric residency, merely weeks away from becoming a board-certified pediatrician. I felt as though I should know how to comfort my daughter, if not as her mother than as a medical professional, who had dedicated more than a decade toward higher education, and the last three years to pediatrics exclusively.

On my newborn rotations in residency, I regularly counseled new parents on the nuances of infants and provided experienced parents refreshers, both clinical and practical. I recited feeding regimens, skin abnormalities, stooling patterns, and other “basics” with ease. I lived by the five S’s— swaddle, side-stomach position, shush, swing, and suck—introduced by pediatrician Harvey Karp in The Happiest Baby on the Block. Again and again, moms watched in awe as I used these techniques to soothe their babies to sleep after marathons of cluster feeding, and I felt like I was empowering them to do the same.

But all of these methods failed to pacify my own daughter. Her screams were so piercing that one night, I took her to her changing table, completely undressed her, and looked at every finger and toe for hair tourniquets. Finding none, I proceeded to perform a full physical examination, complete with cardiac auscultation and primitive reflex assessment. Everything was normal. I swaddled her up, held her in my arms, and sank deeply into the recliner in her nursery. She screamed herself to sleep, and I felt like a failure.

First described in 1954 by physician Morris Wessel in a paper describing infants who cried excessively, colic stems from the Greek “kolikos,” which means “relating to the colon.” Wessel and others suggested that colic stems from gastrointestinal issues, but modern medicine has not pinpointed an exact etiology. To meet the definition, an infant must cry for at least three hours per day for at least three days per week for at least three weeks without an otherwise identifiable cause. Approximately 20 percent of newborns, like my daughter, are subject to this phenomenon, primarily from 3 to 12 weeks of age. But few research dollars are allocated to the condition, because it is self-limiting: In other words, curing colic “just takes time.”

But I wasn’t ready to hear that yet. I’ve always believed that mothers and doctors fix things; we clean up the scrapes and bandage them up. And if we cannot cure the ailment, we give comfort. Finding myself in a situation with my own daughter where I could provide neither my confidence in my abilities as a parent and medical professional plummeted.

In the following weeks, I received a lot of well-meaning advice from friends and family who wanted to help ease the burden. I leaned into my own medical background, as well, reading what little else I could find on the subject: Some parents find comfort in giving their newborns mylicon drops, a medication advertised to relieve the bowels of gas. Others change their infant’s formula or their own diet if they are breastfeeding. I gave my daughter a probiotic, Lactobacillus reuteri, the only medication studies show to have mild benefit.

In my line of work, I have fought harder battles than an infant with colic. During this global pandemic, I have treated patients dying in pediatric intensive care units, unable to be surrounded by their family or friends. Now as a pediatric hematology and oncology fellow, I regularly tell mothers and fathers their child has or is dying from cancer.

But this was my daughter, and her pain penetrated my heart in ways I’ve always hardened myself against while at work. In short, I lost sight of one of the most basic tenets of medical ethics: you do not treat your family.

I was reminded of this at her three-month check-up, when her pediatrician (also a friend from residency) assured me that I was not overlooking any aspect of my baby’s health. This affirmation gave me a new sense of resolution and confidence. Yes, she’s uncomfortable, but I was doing everything in my power to ensure that she’s healthy and loved. With that realization, I started to trust myself as a physician again and recognize that I needed to give myself the space to be her mom first and doctor second. In that space, I found new conviction in the cure for colic: time.

I started to take each day hour by hour, diaper by diaper. And sure enough, like clockwork, around 13 to 14 weeks, the nonsensical crying ebbed almost as quickly as it washed over us.

Relief was an understatement. Seeing my daughter through colic was a singularly terrifying and exhausting experience, one that jettisoned me into the realities of motherhood. There is a helplessness that nobody warns you of as you celebrate the birth of an infant. How somehow your own heart has left your body, and survival, both yours and theirs, is dependent on their wellbeing.

The experience has also lent me a new understanding to each patient encounter. In the moments where I recognize the same of loss of control in new parents that my husband and I went through, I bypass the five S’s and remind them to trust themselves and give it time.

Time is the most contentious medicine. Glance around the waiting room the next time you are at the doctor’s office. I imagine you will find most engrossed in their phones, trying their best to pass the time. We all want something active to help us feel engaged, most especially when there is nothing to do.

But take it from a pediatrician who is also a mother, your child will grow faster than you can possibly imagine. You will be thankful for that some days. Other days you may wish to stop blinking all together, if only to slow down the changes happening right in front of you. But that is not how time works.

Right now, I am enjoying my daughter’s cries of excitement as I walk through the door after a day at the hospital. And I am hoping that one day soon she will sleep through the night. Fingers crossed.

The post Curing My Daughter’s Colic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This was one happy if serious conclusion from a Zócalo/UCLA Anderson School of Management event titled, “Can Individuals Be Happy in an Unhappy Time?” Before an overflow crowd at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown L.A., three scholars who study different aspects of happiness touted a wide variety of research on happiness and offered tips for how to cultivate happiness in yourself.

“When you feel happy, it’s not that you don’t experience those negative things in the world. It’s that those negative things are less intense,” said panelist Cassie Mogilner Holmes, an associate professor of marketing and behavioral decision-making and the Donnalisa ’86 and Bill Barnum Endowed Term Chair in Management at UCLA Anderson. Happiness, she added, “is sort of that immune system that keeps us going.”

The event began with moderator Madeleine Brand, host of KCRW’s “Press Play,” asking the audience to clap if they felt happy at that moment. She received loud—but not overwhelming—applause in response. Brand then pressed the scholars on whether happiness was too fleeting to be an important goal.

The scholars answered that happiness provided such advantages that, one quipped, “it’s almost unfair.” Happier people do better in life by all kinds of measures, from wealth to health. And the benefits accrue, such that the happy get happier.

Holmes emphasized that time has a crucial relationship to happiness. Her research shows that money is less important than people think, and time far more important. Studies from the early part of the decade suggest that once your income reaches $75,000, additional money doesn’t translate into feeling happier in the course of your daily life. Those who focus more on time than money are happier.

“Time leads to greater happiness,” she said, “and people become more deliberate in how they spend their time” over the course of their lives. The trouble is that many of us spend so much of our waking lives doing things—work, housework, commuting—that we don’t enjoy.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at UC Riverside and author of the books The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness, said her favorite theory in psychology is self-determination theory, which argues that we are happy when we satisfy three basic needs: connectedness, autonomy, and competence.

Genetics, she noted in response to an audience question, can affect happiness. So can other factors. But our own choices, especially around how we use our time to satisfy our needs to connect, to be autonomous, and develop our competence, can help. She carpools when she commutes between her home in Santa Monica and her job in Riverside, because “I’m with other people, and I strengthen my friendships.”

The third panelist, UCLA Anderson behavioral psychologist Hal Hershfield, said that while happiness is very important, “meaning, and the pursuit of meaning may be more important…. If you’re climbing a mountain, that may not be a happy experience, but it’s a meaningful one.”

Hershfield discussed his work getting people to look at their future selves, and to figure out what they’ll need to do to make sure they can fund the sort of life they want in the future. The challenge, he said, is that humans are “really bad at predicting what will make us happy.”

But thinking about endings—the ending of lives or the ending of phases of our lives—seems to allow us to focus on the most meaningful things. Studies of college seniors found that they start spending more time with their very closest friends around graduation, he said.

When Brand, the moderator, asked who the unhappiest people were, the panelists initially differed. Lyubomirsky said it was younger people—ages 14-28—because they have less autonomy and less competence. She also said that the current generation of very young people are less happy, have lower self-esteem and more anxiety than previous generations, and those things may correlate with smartphone use and screen time.

Hershfield noted that many studies point to the greatest unhappiness among people in middle age.

But these differences in part reflect differences in surveys and the fact, noted by Holmes, that people experience happiness differently at different stages of life. Young people associate happiness with excitement and enthusiasm, and older people with calm and serenity.

Older people tend to be happiest, suggested Hershfield, because they have time and experience “to focus more on emotionally meaningful goals.”

In response to a question from Brand, the panelists noted that happiness is a particular challenge for Americans. The “pursuit of happiness” is a defining quality of American life—it’s in the Declaration of Independence—but Americans work more and often take less vacation, even though research shows vacation is associated with greater happiness.

Holmes suggested being more attentive to time and to the people around us in the moment will make us happier. As Americans, she said, “we often make decisions, with our Puritan ethic, that we shouldn’t feel happy right in this moment.”

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, an audience member asked the panelists to name one thing they did that made them happier. Brand, the moderator, said she bought a wood-handled scrubber in a Japanese houseware store that cleans perfectly and looks beautiful next to her sink. “That makes me happy,” she said with a chuckle.

Holmes said optimizing unhappy time; during a long commute, “pick up the phone and call your friend who you haven’t spoken to in a while,” she said. Lyubomirsky said she was trying to spend less time on small talk, and foster connection by having bigger conversations with friends, including old ones with whom she had lost touch.

Hershfield said he is trying to create more traditions and routines in his life. He found that taking his daughter to breakfast at the same restaurant every Tuesday made him happier. “It’s the first time I’ve been a regular at a place,” he said.

The post Yes, You Can Be Happy in Sad Times appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We use these units because some of the first people to make precise astronomical calculations, the Babylonians, utilized a base-60 (sexagesimal) number system that they inherited from a more ancient population in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians. The Sumerian base-60 system proved influential on Babylonian and Greek astronomers and, because of this influence, it was later used by Europeans to divide hours into 60 equal units. Contemporary U.S. culture has inherited, in a quasi-accidental series of events played out over millennia, this esoteric linguistic vestige of ancient Mesopotamia.

But surely, some might say, “hours” themselves are real, given to us by nature somehow. Yet these time units, too, are a linguistic remnant. When sundials were first developed in ancient Egypt, their creators relied on a base-10 (decimal) system like that of English wherein 10 serves as a recurring element within larger verbal numbers. (For instance “thirty-one”, “forty-one”, “fifty-one”, etc.) As a result, their sundials broke up the day’s shadows into 10 units. Egyptians added two units to represent the times around sunrise and sunset. The resultant 12-unit system was acquired by various cultures and eventually applied to both days and nights to yield a diurnal cycle with 24 major segments.

If all of this seems a bit arbitrary, that is because it is. There is an astronomical basis for dividing time into years and days. But most temporal units came into existence only because of the features of particular linguistic and mathematical systems. Time seems objective, as if it transcends our socio-cultural environment. But the ways we think of time depend profoundly on the place—and time—in which we live.

Temporal conventions are given to us so early in our development that a person may not remember his or her life before it was dissected into weeks, hours, and minutes. From infancy, linguistically contingent cognitive implements sculpt the way we experience the passing of time. The study of the world’s diverse cultures is demonstrating, more and more, just how much linguistic disparities impact human temporal experience.

The effect of linguistic conventions on the discrimination of time extend far beyond differences in time-related words—for instance, the words “minute” in English and “分钟” in Mandarin that differ in script and sound but refer to the same time span. More profoundly, the numbers that we use to keep track of time differ dramatically across languages and cultures. For example, number systems vary with respect to their bases. While ancient Mesopotamians relied on a sexagesimal system, most cultures have come to rely on decimal systems like the Egyptians’ or ours or, less frequently, base-20 (vigesimal) systems like that employed by the Maya.

The Mayan calendar had 20 names for days, in contrast to our seven, because of the vigesimal nature of Mayan numbers. The popularity of decimal and vigesimal systems owes itself to a non-temporal feature in nature, the quantity of our fingers and toes, but many other kinds of numbers exist, including the base-6 (senary) systems found in some languages of New Guinea. Had ancient Egyptians used a senary system, our days might have 16 hours instead of 24, since daylight could have first been divided into eight (6+2) units instead of 12.

The clock represents Mars and Venus, an allegory of the wedding of Napoleon I and Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria. Photo courtesy of Marie Lan-Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons.

Even the use of the same number base across cultures does not guarantee the same kind of time measurement. Decimal numbers, for example, don’t always yield decimal-oriented time. Napoleon famously abolished a decimal calendar used in post-revolution France, in which months were divided into segments of 10, rather than seven, days. (The expunged calendar had several flaws, a notable one being that laborers were only guaranteed one full day of rest every 10 days.)

Today we continue to rely on an ancient sexagesimal system to tell time, and it would take much effort to overturn this usage. Yet our decimal system also influences our time-telling. When great precision is required, we measure time in tenths and hundredths of seconds, or even in thousandths (milliseconds) and billionths (nanoseconds). At the other end of the scale, we measure years in decades, centuries, and millennia.

Some languages rely on restricted number systems without any bases at all. These include the “one-two-many” systems of some populations in Amazonia and Australia. Some hunter-gatherers do not use any precise numbers. Research by a number of cognitive scientists has shown that such numberless adults do not exactly differentiate quantities greater than three. Instead, they rely on the approximation of most quantities in their day-to-day lives. Such approximation methods are quite useful for most tasks, but do not enable cultures to tell time in precise ways. To do so, they need to innovate or adopt numbers. The development and refinement of linguistic numbers allowed humans to reach into the amorphous, abstract temporal dimension and begin to shape it into things like hours and minutes.

“One-two-many” cultures are not atavistic holdouts from the Paleolithic, but the ways they experience the passing of time do seem to reflect more clearly the ways that most people experienced time for the majority of our species’ existence. Minutes and seconds did not really influence European life until the usage of accurate clocks in church towers became widespread in the 15th and 16th centuries. Pendulum-based clocks and spring-loaded watches were invented and refined in the 17th and 18th centuries, bringing both minutes and seconds to the masses.

These inventions facilitated the coordination of labor that proved critical to the Industrial Revolution and enabled better navigation. Arguably, though, they also made our perception of time less natural. Our construal of time came to revolve around quantitatively based cultural conventions like minutes and seconds, becoming less centered around natural rhythms like the diurnal cycle. Regardless, this new focus on temporal units facilitated the Industrial Revolution that, in turn, led to developments like the creation of time zones in the 19th century. Time zones were initially used to streamline rail travel in North America, though they now influence air travel and many other aspects of our lives. Precise measurement of time also advanced science, eventually expanding our understanding of time itself: Einstein’s proof of the relative nature of elapsed time was based on the constancy of the speed of light, which he knew to be about 300,000 kilometers per second.

Perhaps the most interesting cultural differences surrounding time-sense are not related to numbers, but to how we turn time into space. I have alluded to the “passing” of time, but this passing is also a culturally conditioned idea. English speakers often speak of past events as though they are “behind” the speaker while future events are “ahead” of them. In contrast, speakers of Aymara in the Andes refer to the future as being behind them, while the past is in front. (This makes sense, in a way, since we can more clearly “see” what happened in the past.)

The Yupno of New Guinea refer to the past as being downhill, the future as uphill. Such diverse perspectives surface in gestures, too: When English speakers talk about past events they often point backwards, while Aymara speakers point forwards. The Yupno point downhill when discussing past events, regardless of the direction they are facing while speaking. The Kuuk Thaayorre, indigenous to the Cape York Peninsula in Australia, may point east when speaking of earlier events. Some people do not seem to use space at all when speaking or gesturing about time, for instance speakers of the Amazonian language Tupi-Kawahib. These people do not refer to the future or past as being anywhere in space, unlike speakers of English, Aymara, or just about any other language. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Tupi-Kawahib language also does not offer precise ways of measuring time.

Being human certainly does not require the usage of precise temporal measurements, nor does it require that we even think of time in the same ways when we are not measuring it. Time is fundamental to our lives but discriminated in culturally dependent ways.

The radical variability in how humans construe time illustrates well the extent to which communicative conventions can profoundly impact our lives. More and more, cross-cultural research on time and other basic facets of life is demonstrating that the human experience is more varied than is often assumed. The exploration of cultural and linguistic variation is critical to advancing our understanding both of others and of ourselves. The continuation and expansion of this exploration is, therefore, well worth our time.

The post How Societies Are Defined by the Segmentation of Time appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Stood by the edge of the mountain, the day coming fully
to crows. Stood and the lighted gap offered a moment
of brightest compassion. Before wither, I could intercept
the warm air of distance, knew I would render it drenched
in rigorous grays. I stood in the lack and metered
to make it abundant. Clocking each crescent of moon
and its upward direction. All eye level was surface. The stars
were precise in beginning. Long was the view, though
short its duration. Cloaked at the tripod, I was entrusted
to claim province. Stood in these details: a field, a church,
desert crust, barn door. A moon, ascending, partly
undressed in devotion. My hands again moved a slide
to the holder. Saturated blue slumped over, taking its pitch,
and for a moment, peeling back, in portals of time.

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The post Is there a way to wake up?<p>​(Jena Osman) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A teenager, I didn’t want youth
I wanted the age when I would
be free
Go out and stay out
long as the night
Drive, drink, drink and drive
The unearned freedom of adults
Still it was intriguing …
Could the waters restore,
Preserve, rejuvenate?

Fantasy, history, myth
emblazoned on billboards
I remember a long narrow lane
shaded by strange, massive trees
their canopy touching overhead
Spanish moss making mysterious
the old roadside attraction
Everything old
A crumbling, putrid well
No fountain at all
Was de Leon as disappointed as I?

The post The Fountain of My Youth appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, wanted the data behind why she—and many women she knew—felt that they didn’t have enough time for everything and everyone in their lives. So she called a time use researcher at the University of Maryland, John Robinson (who is known as “Father Time”). Robinson told Schulte that contrary to what she felt, women today aren’t as busy as they were in the 1960s. In fact, they have 30 hours of leisure time per week—and he could prove to Schulte that she did, too.

Schulte—angry that he presumed to know about her life and simultaneously terrified that he was right and she was frittering away her leisure time—started keeping a time diary. But she found that she couldn’t fit her time into the neat categories Robinson prescribed. What should she call the half hour she spent at work, on the phone with the pharmacy filling a prescription for her son, eating lunch, and simultaneously surfing the Internet to figure out how to get a death certificate from China?

When Robinson and Schulte finally met, he took out a highlighter to point out all the leisure time in her schedule: minutes spent lying in bed exhausted, the time she took to exercise, and even spending two hours with her daughter by the side of the road waiting for a tow truck. She didn’t consider that “leisure time” but “bits and scraps of garbage time.”

The 30 hours of leisure time were a fiction. But how, Schulte wondered, can we balance the three great arenas of life: work, love, and play?

Schulte looked at work first. In America, work hours for white-collar workers have been rising since the 1980s after falling for a century. “Our Protestant work ethic has gone into overdrive,” she said. We value long hours and devalue leisure.

The United States has the highest number of working mothers of any country in the world; most American children are being raised by dual-income parents or by single parents. But our laws, policies, and culture haven’t caught up with reality. Our family structures have changed because more women are working than ever before, but our workplaces haven’t accommodated the change. “We still think the ‘organization man’ of the 1950s is the best worker,” said Schulte. And we give “lip service” to flexible and family-friendly policies but don’t utilize them.

Yet our obsession with work doesn’t make us more productive. In France, they take August off, get paid parental leave, and work shorter hours than in the U.S.—and they’re just as productive as Americans in terms of GDP per hours worked.

And we’re losing more than just pleasure. Schulte explained that leisure time is where we daydream and imagine the new possibilities that can make big change happen. “Your best ideas come in your off moments,” she said. Our brains need to oscillate between uninterrupted, concentrated work time and down time. We need time to get inspiration and then time to bring that inspiration back into our work. “Just as we have 90 minute sleep cycles at night, we have 90 minute attentive cycles during the day,” said Schulte. We work best when we work in short pulses.

Yet the U.S. remains the only advanced economy without parental leave or vacation policies. Americans also leave the most vacation days behind of any country, save overworked Japan and South Korea, where people have gone so far as to check into prison to get away from work.

We haven’t caught up at home, either. Women are still doing twice the housework and childcare that men are, said Schulte, even when women are working full-time. The culprit is a “stalled gender revolution.” Men are doing more than in the past, but the amount of time they contribute at home has remained static since the mid-1990s. Women are still the default parents and caretakers.

It wasn’t always like this. “We evolved to be cooperative breeders,” said Schulte. Only now we expect mothers to do it all.

Schulte traveled to Denmark—where time studies showed men and women had the most leisure time of anyone on the planet—to find out how they do it. Danish women have almost as much leisure time as Danish men (and more leisure time than Italian fathers), while elsewhere in the world there is typically a large gap between the sexes. The U.S. is very different from Denmark—bigger, more diverse, with a different political structure. But we can still learn from the Danes, said Schulte. They work intense, bounded hours. They don’t value working overtime but efficiency, and the ability to get your work done in a reasonable amount of time. They also value gender equality so highly that they have a minister of gender equality in their government. And, they value leisure—time off to become refreshed.

The U.S., said Schulte, needs to make large structural changes in the workplace, and in its policy, to prize leisure time instead of busyness. We can also make small but significant changes in our lives.

In the audience question-and-answer session, a woman asked whether men and women are simply wired differently. When her husband took time off from working to watch their young sons, he took them to and from school and to the park, but he didn’t cook or clean. When she was on vacation, she did everything her husband did—and all the chores.

“There’s no brain wiring that says don’t do the dishes,” said Schulte. “That’s cultural expectations and that’s custom.” Studies have shown that women are not wired for multitasking—in fact, multitasking makes both men and women “as stupid as being stoned.” It’s about figuring out how to divide labor fairly, coming up with common standards, and women asserting that their time is valuable and important, too.

What is Schulte doing to help the next generation—her children—live differently?

She said she’s teaching her kids to put joy first on their to-do lists. She’s trying not to overschedule them, and to make more time for human connection. She’s trying to learn to let them fail. She’s trying to let them have unstructured time. And she’s trying to model a balanced life with time for both work and leisure.

The post Why Do Americans Hate Lives of Leisure? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It is just after 10 a.m. on a Tuesday and I am racing down Route 1 in College Park, Maryland. The Check Engine light is on. The car tax sticker on my windshield has expired. The cell phone I’d just been using to talk to one of my kids’ teachers has disappeared into the seat crack. And I’m late.

I screech into the crowded University of Maryland parking garage and wind ever higher until I at last find a spot on the top deck. My palms are sweating. My breath is shallow. My heart races and I feel slightly sick. I throw the car into Park, fumble ineptly with the parking ticket machine, and race down the stairs.

Only later, in revisiting this frantic day in my memory, will I realize that the sky had been that poignant shade of autumn blue and the leaves tinted with red. But as I live it, the stress hormones coursing through my veins tense my entire body and collapse my vision into a narrow, dizzying tunnel. Because I am filled with dread.

This is the day I have been avoiding for more than a year. Today, I am meeting with John Robinson, a sociologist who for more than a half century has studied the way people spend their most precious, nonrenewable resource: time. Robinson was one of the first social scientists in the United States to begin collecting detailed time diaries, counting the hours of what typical people do on a typical day, and publishing scholarly tomes summing up the way we live our lives. For his pioneering work, his colleagues call him Father Time. And Father Time has challenged me to keep a time diary of my own.

He told me that his research proves that I, a hair-on-fire woman struggling to work a demanding full- time job as a reporter for The Washington Post and be the kind of involved mother who brings the Thanksgiving turkey for the preschool feast and puts together the fifth grade slide show, have thirty hours of leisure time in a typical week.

Today, he is to dissect the mess of my time diaries and show me where all that leisure time is. I feel as if I am a bug, pinned on a specimen tray, about to be flayed and found wanting.

Because this is how it feels to live my life: scattered, fragmented, and exhausting. I am always doing more than one thing at a time and feel I never do any one particularly well. I am always behind and always late, with one more thing and one more thing and one more thing to do before rushing out the door. Entire hours evaporate while I’m doing stuff that needs to get done. But once I’m done, I can’t tell you what it was I did or why it seemed so important. I feel like the Red Queen of Through the Looking-Glass on speed, running as fast as I can—usually on the fumes of four or five hours of sleep—and getting nowhere. Like the dream I keep having about trying to run a race wearing ski boots.

And, since I had kids, I don’t think I’ve ever had a typical day.

There was the morning my son tae kwon do round house kicked me when I went to wake him up, which sent my coffee splattering over every single book on his bookshelf. I hurriedly wiped the pages dry so they wouldn’t stick together and render the entire library useless. Which of course made me glaringly late for work and threw my plans for the day into the shredder. My sister Mary has these kinds of days, too. She calls them Stupid Days.

There was the day when my husband, Tom, was overseas again and I flew in late to a meeting with school officials to discuss why our then ten-year- old son, who knew more about World War II than I ever will, was floundering in fifth grade. I dragged along our second grader, still in her pajamas and slippers because she’d stayed home sick. And I nervously kept an eye on my BlackBerry because I was in the middle of reporting a horrific deadline story about a graduate student who’d been decapitated at an Au Bon Pain.

Then there was the time when the amount of work I needed to do pressed so heavily on my chest that I’d said no when my daughter asked, “Mommy, will you please come with me on my field trip today?” We’d been through this before, I told her. I couldn’t come with her on every field trip. Then her big blue-gray eyes started to water. I felt all the breath drain out of me. I thought, at the end of my life, would I remember whatever assignment it was that seemed so urgent—I don’t even recall it now— or would I remember a beautiful day in the woods with a daughter who had been struggling with unexplained stomachaches, was socially wobbly since her best friend moved away, and who still wanted me to be with her? I went. I spent three hours in the woods with her, guiltily checking my BlackBerry, then, after putting her to bed that night, went back to work for another four.

I have baked Valentine’s cupcakes until 2 a.m. and finished writing stories at 4 a.m. when all was quiet and I finally had unbroken time to concentrate. I have held what I hope were professional-sounding interviews sitting on the floor in the hall outside my kids’ dentist’s office, in the teachers’ bathroom at school functions, in the car outside various lessons, and on the grass, quickly muting the phone after each question to keep the whooping of a noisy soccer practice to a minimum. Some appliance is always broken. My to-do list never ends. I have yet to do a family budget after meaning to for nearly twenty years. The laundry lies in such a huge, perpetually unfolded mound that my daughter has taken a dive in it and gone for a swim.

At work, I’ve arranged car pools to ballet and band practice. At home, I am constantly writing and returning e-mails, doing interviews and research for work. “Just a sec,” I hear my daughter mimicking me as she mothers her dolls. “Gimme a minute.” She has stuck yellow Post- it notes on my forehead while I sit working at the computer to remind me to come upstairs for story time.

My editors can recount every deadline I’ve blown. My son, Liam, once recited every single one of the handful of honors assemblies or wheezy recorder concerts I’d missed in his entire life. I was even failing our cat, Max. I asked someone at the pet store what I could do to make him stop scratching up the carpets. “He thinks you’re his mother. He’s showing he needs more attention from you,” she’d said. “Can’t you find time to play with him every day?”

“Can’t I just squirt water at him instead?”

At night, I often wake in a panic about all the things I need to do or didn’t get done. I worry that I’ll face my death and realize that my life got lost in this frantic flotsam of daily stuff. Once, my sister Claire told me that when you smile, it releases some chemical in the brain and calms anxiety. I have tried smiling. At 4 a.m. In bed. In the dark.

It didn’t work.

On some level, I know that who we are depends very much on how we choose to spend this ten minutes or that hour. I know from all those bumper stickers that this is my one and only life, and from the Romans that time flies. And I know from the Buddhists that we should embrace the moment. I wake with every good intention of making the most of my day— to do good work, to spend quality time with my children, to eat less trail mix, to stop driving off with my wallet on top of the car. But then one of the kids throws up, or the babysitter calls in sick, or the kitchen faucet starts gushing water, or some story breaks and everything collapses.

I fast-walk across the University of Maryland campus like it’s Judgment Day. I’m hoping these hectic, tardy, and chaotic little scraps of time that I’ve been tracking will add up to a meaningful life. But as I rush into the sociology building where Robinson works, I’m more afraid they’ll show anything but. I’m terrified that all the mess that I usually keep stuffed behind a friendly, competent, professional, if harried, veneer will come spilling out.

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