WASHINGTON — Let me tell you about a typical day in my life as a working mother. Oh, wait, there is no such thing.

There was the Tuesday I flew in late to a meeting with school officials about why my son was floundering in fifth grade; I dragged along my second-grader, still in her pajamas and slippers because she had stayed home sick, and I kept glancing at my BlackBerry because I was in the middle of reporting a fast-breaking deadline story about a Chinese student who’d had her head chopped off. Then there was the Thursday that the amount of work I needed to do pressed like a heavy weight on my chest, but my heart just about ripped apart when my daughter’s big blue-gray eyes started to water because I had said no when she asked, “Mommy, will you please come with me on my field trip today?” I spent three hours in the woods with her — and my BlackBerry and my guilt over not being at work. I worked an extra four hours after she went to bed that night.

I have baked Valentine’s cupcakes until 2 a.m. and finished writing stories at 4 a.m. My toilet runs. My “to do” list never ends. The unfolded laundry in the upstairs hallway rises like the Matterhorn. I take too long on stories. I haven’t written a book. I eat lunch at my desk. My son can recite the handful of times I’ve missed an honors assembly or concert rather than the hundreds of times I’ve cut out of work to be there. I never feel I do any one thing particularly well.

I am like the Red Queen from “Alice in Wonderland,” forever running faster and getting nowhere. Entire hours evaporate while I’m doing stuff that needs to get done, but once I’m done, I can’t tell you what it was I did or why it seemed so important. At work, I arrange carpools to band practice and ballet. At home, I write e-mails, and do interviews and research for work. “Just a sec,” I hear my daughter mimicking me as she mothers her dolls. “Gimme a minute.” She just stuck a yellow sticky note on my forehead to tear me away from writing this story, at 9:35 p.m., to remind me I’m late to come read Harry Potter for story time. Most days, I feel so overwhelmed that I barely have time to breathe.

John Robinson says I have 30 hours of leisure time every week.

Blame him for this story.

Meet the father of time

Robinson is a 74-year-old sociologist at the University of Maryland. Widely known as the father of time-use studies in the United States, he codes, analyzes and makes pronouncements about how people spend their precious time on Earth. One spring day in 2008, when I was serving on a Washington Post work group studying the newspaper reading habits of women, I called him. Women don’t read newspapers as often as men do, we hypothesized, because, between work, children and keeping the house from falling down, we were all stretched too thin. Women just didn’t have the time.

“Wrong,” Robinson interrupted. “Women have time. Women have at least 30 hours of leisure every week. In fact, women have more leisure now than they did in the 1960s, even though more women are working outside the home.”

“What?” I asked. My head just about popped off. I quickly reviewed my previous week. I’d been up till some ungodly hour the night before making my son do the homework he said he’d finished but hadn’t. I had had a day off but spent most of it weeding or on the phone with Apple trying to figure out why all the icons on my computer had turned into question marks. There was a family dinner at a friend’s house and, each night before bed, a few minutes of trying to read more than the same paragraph of a book that I’d read the night before.

“I don’t have 30 hours of leisure time every week.”

“Yes, you do,” Robinson said. “Come up here and do a time study with me, and I’ll show you where your leisure time is.”

Reluctantly, I agreed. Part of me wanted to prove him wrong. Here was just one more man who had no idea what it was like to live in a working mother’s shoes. But another part of me worried that he might be right. What if I did have 30 hours that could be filled with leisure and I was just too distracted or disorganized to find them? Would the exercise end up being one more thing to feel badly about?

That might be why it took six months before I found the time — or the nerve — to get to College Park. I arrived late. Robinson — tall, gaunt and stooped with a silvery Beatles-style mop top — handed me the time diary. I was to record every minute of my time — filling in little blanks, starting at midnight, for seven days — and then come back.

The time diary

Over the next few months, I made several attempts. But it took too much time. Some weeks, I’d track Monday and Tuesday, then not get back to the diary until Friday or Saturday. By then, I had absolutely no recollection of Wednesday or Thursday, so I’d start over.

One year later, I was ready.

Numbers don’t lie

John Robinson has been getting under people’s skin for decades. He has spent his entire professional life trying to convince people that the way they think they spend their time is wrong. The popular belief that Americans work harder than ever? Wrong, he says. Time-diary data show that Americans, on average, work fewer hours than they did 20 years ago. Americans so stressed out that they’re sleeping less? Wrong. Time diaries show a fairly constant eight hours over the last four decades. Mothers coming home from work to the exhausting “second shift” of housework and child care? Working mothers spending less time with their children than at-home moms did in the 1960s? Everyone too busy for leisure time? Wrong, wrong and wrong.

According to Robinson’s research on how people spend the 1,440 minutes in a day and 168 hours in a week, fathers and mothers are moving toward “androgyny” and have about equal workloads (64 hours a week) if you count both paid and unpaid (housework and child care) work. Despite predictions that mothers would spend 40 percent less time with their children once they entered the workforce, Robinson has found that, compared with 1965, mothers now spend nearly three hours more time every week caring for their children, even though most women now work. People do indeed have plenty of time for leisure, Robinson argues.

What he does not dispute is that people think they have no time. “It’s very popular, the feeling that there are too many things going on, that people can’t get in control of their lives,” he said. “But when we look at people’s diaries, there just doesn’t seem to be the evidence to back it up. It’s a paradox. When you tell people they have 30 or 40 hours of free time every week, they don’t want to believe it.”

Finding leisure time, Robinson says, is an act of will. Once, he kept his own time diary and found he worked 72 frantic hours in a week. “I was not living the kind of life I wanted,” he said. “So I changed.” Now, Robinson, who is divorced and lives alone, sometimes hops on the Metro without knowing where he’s going and gets off when the spirit moves him. He travels, is never rushed and has become a beer connoisseur. He goes out nearly every night. “A day without live music,” he says often, “is like a day without sunshine.”

The magic 30

I carefully scribbled in little black books that I used as time diaries — Saturday, 7 to 7:30 pm: friend at party persuades me to go to tarot card reader set up in living room. “You need some time for yourself to be quiet,” the reader said. “What can you do to give yourself that kind of time? Can you get up earlier?”

I began to wonder if I was alone. Had anyone else, any working mother especially, discovered these magical 30 hours of leisure each week?

I sent out queries: “Looking for Moms with Leisure Time.” I got answers back like this one, from the Oldtownmoms e-mail list in Alexandria, Va.: “If you find her, I think I’d probably put her in a museum, next to Bigfoot, a unicorn, a mermaid and a politician who doesn’t play dirty.”

As I kept my time diary, I realized that I kept putting leisure off, as if I were waiting to reach some mystical tipping point: If I could just finish cleaning out the crayons and shark teeth and math papers and toys and rocks (yes, rocks) from the kids’ closets, fix the coffeepot, pay the bills, send that wedding present five months late — then I could sit down and read a book and not feel guilty. As if leisure were something I needed to earn.

The results

By late summer, one-full year after I started trying to track my time, I had amassed what turned out to be six full weeks of diaries and had made another 10 false starts. I began calling Robinson to have him show me my elusive leisure time.

He pulled out a yellow highlighter and got to work.

The 40-minute runs on Monday, Tuesday and Friday. The 30-minute 6 a.m. DVD workouts in my bedroom on Wednesday and Thursday, and the yoga class on Saturday. All leisure.

“Exercise is leisure?” I asked. “That feels more obligatory.”

The hour at midnight Wednesday mucking around on the computer, beating it roundly in backgammon, answering e-mails. Leisure.

Reading the newspaper, sometimes at 10 p.m. Leisure.

Listening to the news on the radio while trying to haul myself out of bed. Leisure.

Watching movies with the kids. Visiting a sick friend with the kids. Talking to a friend about her leisure time on the cell phone to report this story while taking my son’s bike to the shop for repairs with the kids. Leisure, leisure, leisure.

Printing out a gift card to Best Buy for my friend’s son while yelling at kids and husband to “get into the car now” two minutes before leaving to go to a birthday dinner. Leisure.

Sitting in a hot, broken-down car for two hours on a median strip and playing tic-tac-toe with my daughter while waiting for a tow truck. Yes, that, too.

“Waiting for a tow truck is leisure?”

All together, not counting the tow truck wait, Robinson found about 28 hours of leisure for the week.

I felt deflated.

“But it didn’t feel very leisurely,” I said.