Life today isn’t what it used to be.  Of course, you know that.  We all know that.  We may not know what it used to be, but we know…this couldn’t have been it.

As a working mom, I’ve often wondered why my life and the life of all my congregants and of all my friends (and, everyone I run into on the street, frankly) feels so frenetic.  Why does my day begin and end with the same feeling of not having enough time?  What is it, exactly, that I’m doing that, say, my mother’s generation didn’t do?

My mother got married at 18, graduated college at 19 and went to work.  She was pregnant with me four or five years later and left her job, but she didn’t leave the working life.  With two young children, my mother was a very active volunteer, fighting in the 70s for women’s rights and reproductive rights and strong schools for every child.  In our 3 bedroom condo, one room was designated for both the TV and her desk from which she, as far as I could tell, ran the world.

But, with all that world-running, she was still home at 3:00 when we got back from school and she still had dinner cooked each evening when my father returned.  She read us books and planned our birthday parties and somehow managed to have winter coats ready for the first snow.

And now, when she calls me and I tell her I don’t have time to talk, I remember that I never heard her say that to her mother.  There was time.  Even after she went back to work when I was in high school, there was time.  There was still dinner and parent-teacher conferences and rides to the movies and family vacations.

But, today, we seem to have run out of time.  Like too many natural resources, we may have used it all and are now borrowing from future generations.

I’ve been considering seriously how to recreate the experience of having enough time.  To do that, I’ve been carefully watching where my time goes.  Turns out…life isn’t what it used to be.

For instance, when my mother had an errand to run, my sister and I would climb into the back of her car and off we’d go.  If I have an errand to run, I have to put my son in a car seat with a 5-point restraint where he’ll be until he’s 8 years old.  After that, he’ll be strapped into a booster which could last until he’s 12.  (Seriously?  12?  At 12 I was in the driver’s seat learning how to pull the car out of the garage.) In the new millennium, each time we get in and out of the car, it’s in and out of the harness.

When my mother graduated from high school, she maintained 3 or 4 friends, two of whom she remains in contact still. A few times a year, they’d share a phone call and catch up with each other’s lives.  Because of FaceBook and other social media, I’m not only in regular contact with everyone I ever knew in high school (and a few I didn’t), but with everyone from every job I’ve had, and church I’ve joined and volunteer organization I’ve supported.  And their sisters.  I’m not kidding.  Not only am I in contact with a huge circle of people, but I’m in contact with their families- people my mother and her generation I’m sure had warm feelings about, but didn’t hear from weekly.

And with all that contact come far more social obligations.  There’s physically no way to attend every party to which I’m invited, but each invitation requires a response and sometimes a gift and always a follow-up after the event.  And easy contact also means regular contact.  Gone are the days of being inaccessible.  There’s a circle of people in my life who, after calling my home will call my cell and call my work and send a text and follow up with an email and then start again because it’s been half an hour and I haven’t responded yet.  When they get me, the first thing I hear is “Where have you been?” as if being out of contact for a few hours is the same as having left town for a week.  If it takes more than a day to return the call, I’ll hear instead “Is everything OK”?  No it’s not. I think I’m being followed.

I’m starting to suspect that we’ve created a world in which time disappears in tiny increments, not large swaths.  It’s not that my mother had a smaller life, it’s that she had a larger life.  Her life was filled with the big things like her work and her marriage and her kids.  I’m the one with a small life, filled with a thousand emails and text messages slowly pecking holes in my world leaving the time left for real living thin and fragile.

So, now I’ve figured out why we’re so busy.  Good.  Just in time for me to end this blog entry and move on to the next thing.