Time is the Holy Grail for parents. There's never enough of it, period. The days when there was time to burn seem like a half-forgotten dream. We come to treasure that nightly moment when the kids have been fed, bathed and successfully tucked in. They look like little angels. (Of course they all look like little angels when they sleep. It must be some cosmic trick!) Then, finally, we have an hour or two of free time.

At last, you sigh. And then you pick up your book or change the channel to a grown-up program. Maybe you have an actual conversation that's not interrupted by a fairy princess in cowboy boots singing "Mary Mack Mack Mack, all dressed in black, black black" at the top of her lungs.

Books have been my escape. I devour the pages like freshly baked donuts, pausing just long enough to savor the flavor. Without a book at my bedside, I feel lost. If I'm in the middle of a really good one, I've been told it can be a bit, um, challenging, to get my attention. But all of that changed one day at the warehouse store. I picked up a brightly colored box and stared at it. "The Sims." I'd heard of this computer game.

"Go ahead and get it," my husband said. "Let's all get one." I hesitated. Who has time for computer games? "Come on. Get it," he said again. The tag line on the box read, "Create your Sims! Build their homes! Run their lives … or ruin them!" Well, next thing I knew, it was in the cart and paid for.

Of course there wasn't time to play that night. Or the next. But a few days later, my curiosity got the best of me. I installed it on my computer. Sure, there were dishes to be done, but I just wanted to see what it was like for a few minutes. The graphics were cool. In the game, you randomly assign a personality to cartoons and see what they would do. The next time I looked at the clock, I gasped. Four hours had gone by. I turned off the computer and played catch-up for the rest of the day.

I was back the next day--just for a little while, I promised myself. Before long, I was racing to the computer every spare moment. I tried to keep my Sims happy and clean, despaired over their failed romances and the way they set the kitchen on fire when they cooked dinner.

Suddenly I didn't have time to do anything else. The house was a wreck, the husband ignored, the child fed a diet of hotdogs and SpongeBob. I holed up in front of the computer trying to get my imaginary people to live fulfilling lives. On some level I knew just how silly it was to ignore my real family while I catered to the needs of made-up people. But I didn't care. I had to get them to fall in love, to have children, to do well in their careers. I just had to.

Until one day my daughter asked if she could play Sims with me. I let her decorate their house, even though she chose hot pink carpeting for the living room. It turned out that she liked this game too. Just like Mommy, she really, really liked this game. Uh oh. So we turned off the computer and we went outside to play.

The sunlight made me blink at first, but it felt good to be out in the world again. There's real danger in thinking that those things we do in our "spare" time - reading, playing computer games, watching TV - are what life's all about.

That stuff is just filler. Real people are not.