Going it alone (for a few days)

Those little pangs of nostalgia and twinges of longing I sometimes get for my children's babyhood are always squashed completely at times like this, when my husband is out of town and I'm left to hold down the fort alone. I marvel at how much easier life has become now, with a four-year old and a seven-year old, even if parenting has grown extremely trying in other respects. But the daily routines are easier, bedtimes are predictable, and the guarantee of a fairly seamless night's sleep is pretty certain. 

I remember vividly the first time I had to solo parent. Scott was on the job market, and had to fly to San Francisco for a few days for a conference. L. must have been about seven or eight months old at the time. I remember how the thought of being left alone with him with no help at all (no grandparents were available to help out, those days) struck terror into the very core of my being. How would I cope? Would I cope? Who would I talk to? What if something happened? In the end, of course, I did the coping part just fine--you have to, really; there aren't too many choices. The hardest part of being alone, of being the only parent responsible for a small child, was the heavy sense of responsibility I felt constantly; the feeling that we were alone, he and I, and that I had to somehow step up and become double the parent. After I got him to sleep at night (finally--in those days getting L. to sleep was often a long, two-person process involving lots of pacing around the small apartment, low music playing constantly, and lots of jiggling and jiggling until you thought your back would break in two), I would collapse on the sofa, looking for someone to talk to finally, and finding only the cat and the television screen and the telephone.

I never think much about the wholeness of what marriage is--what it stands for--until my husband is out of town and I wander around at first, feeling like the exposed half of someone else. The first day or two I'm very conscious of my separateness, then slowly it becomes less obvious, although still there, like a thought niggling at me in the back of my mind. The one thing I worry about--over-anxiously, I'm sure, when Scott is away--is that the kids become my sole responsibility for a few days. When I leave work to pick up T., or to get L. from school, I am conscious of the fact that it's just me, no one else to fall back on. I feel more tense, on guard.

I miss my husband, this other half of me. Life is too busy these days with two kids and work to reflect much on my aloneness, the way I did in those old days as a new and tentative parent just beginning to understand what it was all about. I feel a bit like an old pro with this parenting business, and it's a good feeling, it really is. But what's really good and golden is that on Saturday our family will come together effortlessly again, falling back into conversation patterns, easy jokes. I'll feel less small, and less like I'm carrying alone the sweet burden of our little world.

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