Freedom From Being Wanted

This summer our girls are out the door on East Coast adventures, one to a five week summer ballet intensive and the other to a two week Engineering program and then a month of work as a camp counselor. This means that my husband and I will be alone in our house for weeks, free from demands to drive, free from requests for snacks, free from all but the fiduciary burden it took to pay for their East Coast adventures. We don’t have big plans (see the end of the previous sentence.) Just us two, home alone for the month of July.

Finally!

Also, please let it be over.

Every parent of young children dreams of the sustained break during which you get a chunk of time to remember what it was like before waking at the crack of dawn to serve someone else’s needs all day long. There’s a reason that, when your kids are small, 15 uninterrupted minutes in a bath tub provides the same kind of rejuvenating benefits that a two week trip to the beach used to, before you became a parent. We get beat down so low, we forget what up looks like. Having a whole house to yourself for a whole month?  those parents think. What bliss!

Here’s the problem. By the time your kids are old enough to leave you alone for that long, mature enough to fly off into the world without you? They’ve pulled an insidious trick and become your favorite people, and you have become the person who whines when they leave. No one makes me laugh harder than our youngest and her off-kilter reactions to life. (Sample: “Here’s a tshirt of mine you can borrow.” Her response: “Great.” Pause. “I’m going to wear it as pants.”) And the older one is so super competent that built me a desk on Wednesday. BUILT ME A DESK. Did I mention the engineering?

In the past two weeks I’ve spent afternoons with moms whose children are under the age of 5. I see how tired you are, Mama. I see that those children aren’t doing anything that doesn’t involve touching you simultaneously. I know you want to finish a sentence without someone sticking a finger in your mouth.

But here’s the thing: I would trade you three days of my freedom for three days of being really needed again. Take my empty hours for reading and napping and looking with wonder at how clean your house has stayed. I’ll take the kids who will sit in my lap so I can hug them for long, long periods of time.  Your kids will definitely want you back at the end of it, if only because you probably don’t cry nostalgic tears when they pull out the Thomas The Tank stuff. (Lest you think I’m getting maudlin here, you’re right, and in case you missed it, I blame Inside Out.)

Luckily, I’ve figured out the one thing that will make the time pass quickly during this unaccustomed period of parental freedom.

I’m going home to stay with my mom and dad for two weeks, and deprive them of theirs.

Two less eggs to fry. And all I do is cry.

                   
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