Can I Have Tuesday?

September 14, 2026

I keep thinking about how hard I fought for independence as a child. I wanted to use the phone by myself, cross the street by myself, walk to school by myself. Every one of those things felt like proof that I could manage another part of my own life. Growing up, as I understood it then, meant becoming more capable and needing less permission.

Somewhere along the line, adulthood became the opposite.

I got very good at being responsible. I became dependable, capable, available. I could make difficult decisions, carry consequence, solve problems, manage things that actually mattered. And somehow that same adult could still find herself wondering whether she could take Tuesday off.

That part is almost laughable to me now.

I could make decisions that affected other people’s lives. But Tuesday still had to be cleared through somebody else.

And yet I would not ask permission to use a bathroom.

I think what happened was much less dramatic than I want it to have been. Nothing was taken all at once. Things just became adjacent until they were treated as the same thing. Being available sat beside being responsible. Being dependable sat beside being willing to give more. Sacrificing time sat beside commitment. Eventually I stopped noticing where one ended and the other began.

That is such a strange inversion.

I spent childhood trying to prove I could manage myself, then adulthood proving I could be available to everything else.

The more capable I became, the easier it was to hand over time. Meetings, obligations, deadlines, work that followed me home, vacation that technically existed but never felt especially usable. None of it looked dramatic. That is probably why it worked so well. It all looked ordinary. Responsible. Professional. Sensible. I was not trapped in some obvious way. I was just constantly negotiating access to my own time.

I think that is why my son’s comment stayed with me.

After nearly a year on strike, with all the hardship that came with that, he was talking about the possibility of being laid off for a week. I expected him to connect it to the year, to what had been lost, to what it meant. Instead he basically saw a week.

A week off.

A week to do what he wanted.

That was it.

He did not reach for some bigger meaning. He did not make the week responsible for the year that came before it. He just saw time.

I think I would have done the opposite for most of my life. I would have attached the week to the event. I would have measured it against what had already happened. I would have made it part of a larger story before it had even started.

And maybe that is what has shifted in me.

Events are just events.

They happen. They matter. Sometimes they are wonderful and sometimes they are awful, but they come and go. Working the Tuesday is an event. Missing the Tuesday is an event. The job is an event. The promotion is an event. The difficult year is an event.

Time is the thing underneath all of them.

That sounds embarrassingly simple, but I do not think I understood it in the way I do now. I treated time like the space around life, like the blank part holding the important things. The job, the problem, the achievement, the crisis, the plan. Those were the things I organized myself around.

Now I think those were just things happening inside time.

The Tuesday matters because it is time.

The week matters because it is time.

The afternoon in the studio matters because it is time.

The dinner that runs long matters because it is time.

Not because any of those things are automatically more meaningful than work, but because they are all drawing from the same place. There is no second account somewhere for the life I am going to get to later.

I think what I was not valuing enough was the time itself. I behaved as though there would always be more of it. Another Tuesday. Another summer. Another dinner. Another afternoon I could spend doing something I actually wanted to do. I was selective about plenty of things in my life, but strangely generous with the one thing I could never replace.

Anything I say yes to is receiving a piece of my life.

That is probably the part I keep circling.

We all say we want more time.

Nobody really means more events.

We mean more of the actual thing.

And I think that is the seat I want at the table now. The one where I get to decide what gets my time.

Six-year-old me was fighting to cross the street alone.

I was asking if I could have Tuesday.