marshmallow moment noun (I think)

1. a light, sweet, non-productive moment of forgetting that time exists

2. the cushion between our crumbly-cracker time

-I called Rylie a "marshmallow brain" yesterday morning.

It was all I could do to draw the attention off of myself.  I'd told her around 7:30 AM I was going to the store but there I was at 10:00, and 10:30 telling her I was "fixing to go".  Rather than have a graceful understanding that I was "doing something", and that I would go when the time was right, Rylie called me on it.  She reminded me that I have a bad habit of always saying I'm going, but I'm really not.

That's why I had to tell her that I wasn't going to be influenced by someone who had done nothing more than watch morning cartoons for over two hours, "a marshmallow brain" ( I occasionally resort to light name-calling).

Fast forward to 2:30.

It's time to pick Rylie up from a Splash party at church. I tell Hallie that I'll be home "in like fifteen minutes".  She says, "It won't be fifteen minutes, will it?". It strikes me at this moment that my children have busted me on my issues with time precision/perception, or maybe both.

Call it ADHD or a coping mechanism that overtakes me when I've been too busy, but there are times when I go to a place where there's no tick-tock; a mindless place where nothing HAS to be done. Right now I'm calling it "Summer".

Don't get me wrong.  I'm almost always on-time for scheduled events like church, appointments, meetings and school. I can do rigid.  There's just something in me, I suspect in us all, that cries out for flexibility.  I yearn for time where the hands on the clock do a little- two steps forward, one step back dance.  I like days where it seems, if just for a bit, like the hands on the clock stop.

It's summer.  The days are longer.  Perhaps they're not longer so that we can do more.

I have the library calendar stuck to my fridge.  The events that Rylie wants to attend are circled with sloppy purple marker.  The church calendar is pinned to my bulletin board.  I have white notecards with dentist and other appointments scribbled down.  Still, there's this white space. White space with possibility and white space where there's nothing more to be done than watch a show, or two.

I can write on my blog.

A sweet friend dropped a book that I've been wanting to read by the house.  I'm going to read it.

I can text an old friend...... for an hour, or have a thumb war with one of the kids.

I can allow myself moments of being a marshmallow brain; abandoning productivity.  I can relax in the sweet and flexible white-space that will be soon be sucked into the black-hole of real time.

 

And on that note, I must go.  My dryer is about to buzz.

Thankful for marshmallow moments.

For those of you still stuck in real-time, are there any marshmallow moments you long for this summer?