It isn't a rat race. It isn't a race at all.

Every evening, I sit in my office and watch the clock as the minutes tick forward. When it hits 6 p.m., I grab all my things and race for the door.

It's not because I hate my job. It's because on a good day (and we all know how frequently the MTA has "good days"), it takes me at least an hour to get home. In an ideal world I walk through the door at 7 p.m. and we aim to have Eli in bed by 7:30.

Every evening is a race against time.

I spend that narrow half-hour on the bridge between two worlds, alternately wishing time would speed up and slow down. Usually I'm in such a rush to jump into our bedtime routine that I don't change out of my work clothes, sometimes shedding my tights in the foyer of our apartment and counting down the minutes until I can unhook my bra. (You know you've done it too.) (On some nights Eli has been known to survey me suspiciously and ask: "Why aren't you in your pajamas?")

If he's not already dressed for bed, I hurry Eli into his pajamas and into the bathroom to brush his teeth. If he stalls, I threaten to reduce the number of books we read at bedtime (three is the sacred number). I limit the number of drinks of water he can have and the number of times he can say goodnight to Daddy and the number of minutes I'll hang out in his room.

Then after I've left and am finally, blessedly unhooking my bra, I realize that I miss him.

In the mornings, too, we have plenty of time between when my early bird wakes up and when we have to leave for school, yet we seem to be always rushing. He doesn't want to walk himself to the elevator, or he wants a snack "for the road," or he wants to bring a gigantic fire truck, presumably so that he can refuse to let other kids play with it. I hurry to school, swerving the stroller around puddles and poop and people waiting for the bus, and then I linger in the doorway, wanting to watch him a little longer, not wanting to say goodbye.

I've written before about how challenging it is to be a working parent. (Funnily enough, it was right at this same time of year. I guess December, when the days are short and the holidays are imminent, is an especially tough time of year to be a working parent!) In the year since I wrote that post, there's been a lot in the news about companies offering more parental leave for newborns, but other than that, when it comes to flexibility and work/life balance, not a lot has changed. I still feel guilty racing out the door of my office at 6 p.m. when everyone else is still at their desks as if I don't have a single second to spare (spoiler alert: I don't), and I also still feel guilty racing Eli out the door of our apartment every morning as he casts pitiful glances backwards at all the toys he's leaving behind.

Lately there's also been a nice dash of existential melancholy mixed in, too: What am I doing this for? What's the point of all this? It seems like an apt question that applies whether "this" is "editing the copy on this PDF of this flier for the millionth time" or "snapping Eli's chuggers together, at his request, then waiting patiently as he has a complete meltdown in reaction to the fact that I snapped the chuggers together at his request."

This morning, when we were about three-quarters of the way to school, Eli announced that he had to pee. So I started running. "I see it!" Eli shouted as we neared his school, hopping casually out of his stroller as I panted and wiped the sweat from my neck. It was fitting: These days I feel like I'm always running toward or away from something, constantly in a hurry to get somewhere so that when I get there I can think ahead to being somewhere else.

(For the record, he squeezed out approximately one drop of pee after dancing into his classroom and breezily greeting everyone like he hadn't made me sprint the final quarter-mile to school.)

It's fitting then too that I'm participating in the holiday running streak, running a mile every day between Thanksgiving and New Year's. Because every day this month I've found myself out running, wanting to get it over with while simultaneously wishing it could last longer, not sure where I'm running to or how fast I'm planning to run there, not even sure if it's the best idea to be out running at all.