I spend a lot of time on maintenance. There’s household maintenance: washing dishes, folding clothes, clearing off surfaces that mysteriously reclutter themselves the minute I look away. Sweeping my floors could be a full-time job, some days. There’s kid maintenance: making snacks, planning meals, directing activities, clipping toenails, braiding hair, turning out lights at bedtime. There’s social-skill maintenance: teaching the children how to interact with one another, and helping them practice those skills again and again and again and again.

And then I take a maintenance break and go online to read yet another study showing that parents think they ought to spend more time with their kids, and I think, well, of course.

Because my kids? Are with me or my husband twenty-four hours a day, every day, every week. The older ones are home schooled, the younger ones are home, and we’re all together all the time.

And I still think I’d like to spend more time with them.

Because most of the time that we’re together, we’re not Being Together. We’re making lunch, we’re tidying the playroom, we’re working out whose turn it is to ride the tricycle. Or maybe I’m working whether Audrey or Sadie gets to ride the tricycle while Owen waters the vegetable garden and Abigail reads a book in the shade.

We’re together, technically, but we’re not Being Together so much as Being Nearby Each Another. It’s not the same thing. Even if we’re all working on the same project, half the time it’s maintenance. It’s not fun, it’s not exciting, it’s just necessary.

I’m glad we get to do that—even Being Nearby is relationship-building, if not meaningful and fun in the way Being Together might be—and they have to learn to do the maintenance stuff sometime, so they might as well learn by doing it together. But still. It doesn’t feel like we spend all that much time Together.

Today I didn’t do maintenance. Not hardly. A little bit of household stuff, very little in the way of meal prep, and then I laid on my bed and read books to whomever wanted to listen. And then Owen read to us, and then we all went out to the backyard together and admired the sunflowers and ate the cherry tomatoes. We did an art project, we read some more.

The house is a wreck—there’s a reason we do so much maintenance usually—but we were Together quite a lot.

I’d like to devise a routine that involved more Together and less maintenance, but I’m not sure how to make that work. We still need to eat meals, we still need to wear clean clothes, we still need to be able to walk through the house without tripping over lego creations. Still, it’s something to ponder. Because my kids are really cool people, and they grow very very quickly. I’d like to spend more time with them, you know?