I Live For Weekends

I find that I have lived for weekends almost my whole life. As a schoolgirl I could not wait for Friday afternoons! Even when I had classes that I enjoyed and teachers that I found very nice and equally as interesting, I could hardly wait for my weekends to start. And then when I worked at the two jobs that I actually loved in my life, I still wished the weekdays away so I could begin my weekends. And as a young stay-at-home Mom, busy with the kids, I so looked forward to weekends. I guess back then there was something about weekends that offered a sense of freedom, a feeling of relaxation associated with weekends, and there were no set schedules to keep on weekends as was the case during the week. So I can understand why in those schooldays, and workdays, and raising kids days, I would feel exhilarated as the week drew to a close. But I had to think as to why I still get that giddy feeling now with a grown family, and with schooldays and workdays far behind me. Why do I get that eager feeling, that wonderful 'Oh! It’s almost Friday!' excitement toward the end of the week?

I feel sometimes as if I am almost wishing my life away as I live for weekends. And at one time I hated that about myself because I felt there was no reason to do this as my weekdays have never really been horrible, and especially so not now, in fact I enjoy my weekdays very much now. I spend lots of wonderful one-on-one time with my grandson Jayden, I spend a few hours enjoying time with both Jayden and my granddaughter Mia together each week, I have a great time spending a few hours a week with my friend Barbara, and I love having a visit mid-week with my sister-in-law Susie. I also have fun spending time on the computer writing, ‘talking’ with friends, visiting blogs, exchanging emails, and I like spending time on phone visits. I drop Jayden at nursery school three afternoons a week and then I go to Mass, and I take a walk, or have a quick cup of coffee with friends, or go home and catch up on some reading, so I have all these wonderful things going for me that I derive great enjoyment from during the week. In addition to all this pleasure there’s a big house that needs cleaning (but I really do not love cleaning, so I always try to find something else to do). And almost everything in my life (besides cleaning) is very interesting to me, so I am never really bored, and my time is fully occupied in a most agreeable fashion nearly every single weekday (again, except for the cleaning part, that is time occupied but in not such a pleasurable way). And my weekdays never drag on as I hear others complain about, in fact, for the most part my weekdays fly by. Yet, I still anxiously await the weekends and happily greet them.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately and I guess even though my weekdays now are filled with lots of free time and lots of fun compared to what it might have been in the past, I still look forward to the weekends because they are different from the routine of my weekdays. And also on weekends I have my husband home. Ray and I usually spend part of the weekend with other family members too, which is always nice. The kids will drop in for a visit, the grandkids are around for Ray to spend time with, sometimes his brother and his nephew will come to watch a movie with us on a Saturday night, or once in awhile we’ll have family over for a game night, or we might go out to dinner with some of them. Ray and I don’t usually plan anything special, just the usual weekend ritual, or tackling a weekend project around the house together is always fun, even shopping, taking a drive, a visit to the cemetery, taking a walk in the neighborhood, just filling the weekend with nothing things that I love doing with him. Every now and then there are the ‘special’ weekends spent hiking, or antiquing, or a weekend spent in Mystic, or in Manhattan. And, of course, once summer rolls around the weekend pool parties start and that’s always lots of fun.

So I guess now in my “not-so-old” yet “no-longer-young” stage of life I look forward to my weekends because my weekends are wrapped up in my husband and extra time spent with family. I’m thinking now maybe my living for the weekends is not so bad when thought of as living for time spent with Ray. At this point in my life my weekdays although very enjoyable, entail a lot of ‘me’ time, while my weekends are all about ‘we’ time. So I’m not going to beat myself up anymore as I continue ‘living for weekends’. I will just look at it as ‘living for Ray’. That sounds a lot nicer than living for weekends, and it seems a lot less like I’m wishing my life away. I’m going to deem my Saturdays and Sundays as Raydays.