The Rythyms of Life

Until January of 2013, my husband worked for a local ConAgra food plant in the trucking division. His schedule was pretty erratic. We never knew what day he was getting off until the night before. He left home at two-thirty pm every day to start work at three-thirty. This was our only constant. His return home was anytime between midnight and four am.

We adjusted our lifestyle to fit the job. He slept most days until one-thirty. I did quiet things during his sleeping time, writing, reading, exercise etc. I usually stayed in my pajamas until after he left. I did all my housework while he was gone as well as my outside the home stuff. My usual bedtime was midnight after I had made a meal of some sort for him to eat upon his arrival home. I didn't get up until around eleven. I wanted some sleeping with my husband time. This was awkward but we made it work.

Since the first of January my husband's already erratic job has become even more so. He was switching positions and shifts to help keep the old company keep going. Mostly we had a few days warning, sometimes not. This affected all areas of our lives, transportation, family events, sleeping patterns, even how and what we ate became involved. My shopping habits had to change. My refrigerator kept being rearranged to accommodate the “new” food that best suit our schedule with each change.

May brought even more changes as the new trucking company took over and we had to adjust to their way of doing things as well as different shifts and positions as again he helped the new company get started. His job became a day to day change. He even had a few days that he was told he had off only to be called in by someone else who had him on the schedule.

June brought my two daughters full time for six weeks into the mix with their own busy schedules. I've already written about that. I didn't realize how much stress this had all been to me until this past week. I have a plaque that reads, “Blessed are the flexible for they shall never be bent out of shape.” I am pretty adaptable.

But last week the girls went back to their dad's house and my husband finally started the job he had been hired on to do. I realized how exhausting it had all been and kind of crashed. Hence, no blogs and not much of anything else.

Our new schedule is one we've never had in our almost nine years of marriage. And neither of us had it in our past marriages for quite a number of years. It is the much coveted (much dreaded) day shift! Our days now start at 5 am, a time I haven't seen for a long time. He now comes home for dinner every night (another thing I haven't had to do for a long time) and we are in bed by ten pm. I am changing everything again but hopefully this will stick for awhile. I'm not quite ready to take the blackout curtains off our bedroom windows but I am thinking about it.

People for generations lived with the regularity of rarely changing schedules. The rhythms of life ebbed and flowed with the seasons of life as well as with the seasons of the earth. There was a surety and a simplicity that built great foundations in everyone's lives. It was important.

Today's world has lost those valuable rhythms. After the last six months I know why everyone has sleeping and depression problems. We are out of sync with those rhythms and it's making us crazy. That's the view from my side of the street, what's yours?