These days there’s a lot of talk about “over-scheduling” of children. Too much structured time. Kids don’t have enough time these days for good old-fashioned day dreaming. You know that behavior that we call “spacing out,” “tuning out” or “ADD” symptoms? Yeah, that one. Well,  here’s my thought on that: I say that grandmothers don’t have enough day-dreaming time. Yes, we run, we go, we text, we drive, we shop, we — and then we collapse into bed at night, and suddenly wonder why we are so stressed.

And then, stress may lead to daydreaming – but not the blissful, imaginative, positive kind. Something entirely different.

Today, during a particularly busy and cluttered day, I added “day-dreaming” to my activities of the day – but the wrong kind of day-dreaming. I added “worrying” to my day. I actually scheduled “worrying” and “obsessing” into my “to-do” list, somewhere between Go To the Cleaners, and Go to My Office. If you ask me what I worried about, I can’t really remember exactly, but it sure produced a knot in my stomach. It prompted me to call my husband at work, ask him what he thinks, listen to him respond how I’m “worrying for nothing,” and then hang up and worry more. In the meantime, I called (or emailed) several (that means at least 2 or 3!) friends to kvetch to them about my particular worry, and finally when Friend #3 told me that my worrying was baseless, I breathed a sigh of relief.

This episode taught me a few things. First, it reminded me of how important it is that we grandmothers stay very very, very busy —so busy that we have no time to even day-dream!  We have to be completely over-scheduled. We cannot leave even a minute unaccounted for.

This may take some planning on some days, and may happen naturally on other days. One way or another – it is IMPORTANT,  because the grandmother mind tends to wander and imagine and fantasize and —you get the idea.

Secondly – and more importantly — the incident taught me that I need to inject myself with a heavy dose of faith, and relinquish some control of things that are anyway beyond my power.  (We can’t really control these things that we “worry” about, can we?).

So the next time, your grandson’s teacher tells his parents at Parent/Teacher Conferences that the child day-dreams in class, don’t buy the excuse by his parents: “Day-dreaming is good! It produces imaginative kids…” Nope. The teacher is right. That day-dreaming kid in 5th grade may grow up to be a worry-wart grandparent. And that’s not good for anyone!