Ode to a Color-Coded Calendar

The warm, morning sun shines brightly through my window, illuminating the freshly wiped white board calendar in front of me, and, at this moment, I wonder if I have ever seen a more beautiful sight.

My 3-year-old son sits near me at the kitchen table—deep in pretend play with a tractor and a plastic apple tree. I watch as he fills the tractor up with apples—a trick of a hidden magnet—before I turn my attention back to my own task at hand. Surrounding the calendar, I have assembled a handful of supplies: my iPhone, four fine-tipped dry-erase markers, and an iced coffee with sweet cream for good measure.

It’s the first of the month. I have schedules to organize.

I bought this calendar when my daughters were three and four years old. Both were in half-day preschool at the time, and each week they had to bring an object—an animal, something with wheels, something that starts with “C”—to their respective classes. My husband, Jake, hung the calendar on the center of a wall in our kitchen because I needed a visual way to keep track of two different show-and-tell schedules each week.

Bless me.

Before the color-coded calendar took its place of prominence on our wall and in my life, I spent entire, schedule-less days in our home with those same girls while Jake worked long hours during his medical residency. We had just moved to a new state where I knew no one, and every morning, after the girls had eaten breakfast, we would head to our basement playroom. Each time we made it down there, I felt like I had lived half a day already, but when I’d look at my watch, 8:30 a.m. would stare back at me.

Coffee in hand, I’d turn on the tv once the girls were situated. Since I was always early to Live! With Kelly and Michael, George Stephanopoulos and Robin Roberts would greet me from Good Morning America, and I would enjoy an hour and a half of other people’s adult conversations in between puzzles with the 2-year-old and whatever the baby did back then to stay busy. When Michael Strahan left Kelly Ripa for GMA full-time, I wasn’t even disappointed. He was still there to keep me company during those eternal mornings—just from a different desk.

The pace of my life is much faster six years later.

I have since added two more colors to the calendar, a second school schedule, piano lessons, and, now, three soccer schedules. In the weeks ahead, I will also include all the various activities the end of the school year promises like the 26 ABC-themed days to round out preschool. Last year, my daughter, Norah, had a bonus show-and-tell day in May, which I only remembered when I got an email from her teacher letting me know I forgot. I apologized to Norah after school and told her she could take something the next day instead.

“It’s okay,” she said. “A bunch of my friends forgot too.” So, at least there was that.

Do you know why I forgot? I hadn’t taken it out of my brain and written it in pink—her assigned color—on the calendar.

Yesterday—after I dropped three kids off at two different schools by 9:00 a.m., I drove around town to three different stores for soccer cleats, soccer socks, shin guards, and size 3 soccer balls, picked up a kid from school, and spent nap time ordering soccer uniforms and feeling as though I had sacrificed my soul on the altar of childhood athleticism—I sent Jake the gif of George Michael dropping his backpack and then resigning his body to the carpeted floor from a scene in Arrested Development.

This is the energy I bring to the white board calendar this morning—a feeling of resignation laced with a tiny bit of panic. I put off all extracurriculars for a long time because I knew once we were in it, we’d never stop being in it. There are so many games and practices to write in purple and pink and green (no need for the blue marker yet), and I can’t help but feel like I’m losing control—like my kids’ childhood and all the time I spend with them is slipping away through my fingertips.

Who could have guessed that I would miss those bygone days where there was literally nothing on the calendar, and I willed the clock to move forward past Kelly and Michael’s closing banter?

I know soccer season is short and that four hours a week still gives us all plenty of hours together. I know the kids will have fun and gain skills more valuable than pull backs and ball control. I know we don’t even have to do any of this. Extracurricular sports are certainly no requirement for a fulfilling childhood after all.

I know all this, and still I can’t help but look into the future when we’re juggling two high school sports schedules and 2 middle school sports schedules and friends and sleepovers and their own cars and cell phones and curfews all while wondering if we’ll ever sit down for dinner at the same time again. So help me if Michael Strahan retires from Good Morning America. I need to know some things will stay the same.

This is when I remember to exhale.

Today—right now—it’s just me and this calendar.

Tomorrow, we will set up chairs and blankets on the sideline of our very first soccer game. We will cheer for all of Norah’s touches and have quiet conversations about the 7-year-olds who already have actual skills. (“So, Graham is a baller,” Jake will whisper to me.) We will comfort Norah after she gets hit in the face with a ball, and also let her know that, in this instance, it is okay to try to steal the ball away from the other team.

At one point, Jake will lean back in his chair and say, “Well, this is us now,” and I will realize that the advent of sporting events isn’t a loss of family time. Rather, it’s a new way for us to be together.

If motherhood has taught me anything, it’s to hold it all loosely. Change is the constant, and the best I can do is enjoy where I am and what I am given each day. Those mornings of puzzles and books in the basement playroom were simpler but they were not better or worse than where we are now.

Today, I am here. I write the rest of the soccer games on the calendar and, while I still feel the sadness of time moving us forward whether I like it or not, the panic is gone. The simple act of writing down all our various commitments makes me feel better. It pulls the days and times from the place in my mind where everything swirls together as One Big Thing. Here, on the calendar, each activity has its place; I can see it all as singular, manageable events.

I hang the calendar back on its place on the wall and put the markers back into the drawer just as Jake rounds the corner into the kitchen.

“What do you want to do today?” he asks.

“Anything,” I say. Today, time is ours.

Molly Flinkman is a freelance writer from central Iowa where she lives with her husband, Jake, and their four kids. A lover of houseplants, neutral colors, and good books, she loves to write about how her faith intersects the very ordinary aspects of her life and hopes her words will encourage and support other women along the way. You can connect with Molly on Instagram or through her monthly newsletter, Twenty Somethings.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.