Quality Time is About Privilege
Art by @chimmayart
I remember my mother leaving for work in the mornings. I’d wake during the summer months in south Texas, the sun scorching our skin by 9 am, cicadas loud and pissed off. My mother would get ready in our tiny bathroom, always too crowded for her towers of beauty products, cheap paint helplessly trying to hide the cracks in our cement wall. Our bathroom was pink, but not a pretty in pink, pink. It was a pale pink, an overtired and overworked shade, unable to hide its melancholy behind its bright fake exterior. My mother was a woman of good taste, she wore bright and cheerful clothing, red lipstick and big hair. So I was always perplexed as to why she chose that horrendous color for our home. Not only were the walls pink, but the blinds were pink too. The sofa was pink, the floor tiles were pink, the picture frames were pink, the dress I wore for my 6th birthday was pink, the cheap decorations were pink. Pink, pink, pink. Our house looked like a Lisa Frank’s dream. Or nightmare, I’m still not sure.
Now I think, perhaps it's only those who have time to spare who can afford to have good taste in decor. My mother spent 12 hour days dying people’s hair, perming hair, cutting hair, making their hair longer/shorter/blonder/darker/stupider/ and coming home to a monochromatic nightmare was the best she could do. Maybe a monochromatic nightmare is the best way to hide cracking cement walls.
I do remember every day I would begin to miss her before she even left for the day. I knew I wouldn’t see her until after dark. She’d come home, tired, hungry, guilt-ridden for not bringing home her best self, and go into our tiny Pepto Bismol inspired bathroom, take off her clothes she undoubtedly ruined with developer bleach, and wash off the day. Sometimes she’d be there for hours. I don’t know if that gave her pleasure or if that’s was how long it took to put stamina back together. I remember I missed being close to her. I can’t say I missed talking to her or doing things together. Not because I didn’t enjoy those things, we just never found the time. So I was ok being in the same vicinity as her. Quiet. There, but not there. Even that was a treat, because most days, life got in the way of quality time. Perhaps that's a concept only the privileged have the luxury of experiencing.
Quality time. Such a pretentious concept. We didn’t have such luxuries in our tiny, badly decorated home. We were always catching up, life demanding we do one other thing for someone else before we did the things with people we cared about. By the time we are done serving the world, we are too caught up in our frustrated minds to listen to one another. When you rent your time to serve others, you rarely have the energy to ponder the relationship with your mind, body, and soul. How can you ask your body and soul what it needs, when the world has conditioned you to only care what others need from you? We live each day exhausted, sick, with an insatiable hunger for life, food, joy, and peace, and ask ourselves why we can’t satiate our hunger.
Before we find the answers, I think we need to ask the right questions. Is it sustainable to continue living mindlessly disconnected from ourselves? Can we undo hundreds of years of social conditioning that's turned us into empty shells, filling it with fleeting moments of instant gratification? Who is responsible for my mother not being able to give me the attention I needed? And what do I need to do to break the cycle of generational trauma for myself and those close to me? As every life coach tells us, how do we get our power back? How do we save us... from ourselves?