Since starting his new career -- and our new lives -- my husband has been working long hours. We no longer have equal time when it comes to the daily task of raising our kids. I'm with them 24 hours a day and have had almost no opportunity in the past five months to escape for a couple of hours. While I love my kids more than anything, I needed a break. Burnt out, depleted, I, like most people, occasionally need a minute to breathe and remember who I am. I need a moment to not be needed. Recently, after a little bit of pleading, my husband agreed to take the little ones out on his next day off and give me that time I so desperately required.
That day arrived and, after what seemed like a painstakingly slow process, the three of them finally got dressed and out the door. As I shut it behind them, I felt downright giddy with anticipation. There was an eerily foreign world waiting at my feet with the promise of two whole hours to myself. Time and space and nobody's needs to fulfill. Oh my god, the FREEDOM! My heart was actually pounding and I felt a little light-headed. What to do first? Think, THINK! Ok, I needed a game plan and it involved a box of Thin Mints that I had bought two weeks ago from a conniving little girl scout. I hadn't touched the cookies until now but suddenly it seemed like the next best thing to uncorking a bottle of good champagne. I effortlessly devoured half the box while aimlessly surfing the Internet. It was good step - but why waste the precious little time I had by going online? I turned on the tv. I havn't seen daytime tv (that wasn't animated) in a long time. I fidgeted while I flipped channels. Ok, now I know why I hadn't seen daytime tv in so long. Waste of time. Lame. What else? Not enough time to nap and I was way too amped up to sleep anyways, so I wandered from room to room aimlessly. Music! Of course. I flipped through the CDs looking for something that didn't include The Muffin Man or Itsy Bitsy Spider. White Stripes? Jazz? No, I decided to go back to my college days - music I didn't much play around my kids...Nirvana, Opal, Soundgarden. It felt ridiculously good to listen to it loudly and alone.
Because I couldn't totally fight the 'to-do list' mindset, I decided to finish repainting a bookcase that I had started weeks ago but couldn't do while the kids were awake and about. I picked up a cheap brush and began to paint. The music was visceral to me - the stuff I listened to back when I was in art school, painting in a studio without heat at 1:00 a.m. It was palpable, emotional music, get-lost-in-it music and it was the soundtrack to a very heady time in my life. When you're in your early 20s, everything is a roller coaster and anything is possible. Back then I stood for hours painting in a freezing cold studio that smelled of turpentine and oil paint. I loved it. Nothing but easels, splattered walls layered with paint, and an old beat-up couch that I didn't dare sit on back then because I'm pretty sure it had scabies. I can picture everything about that studio as I were standing in it right this moment. But on this day, I sat listening to the Bose stereo in our suburban 1970s living room, slapping odorless acrylic paint on a cheap bookcase that we couldn't afford to replace and wondering how we wound up in this town, this state, this somewhat mundane reinvention of our lives.
Two different scenes; two different lifetimes. I really don't yearn to go back, but the opportunity to listen to Chris Cornell wail on Black Hole Sun, or sing/scream at the top of my lungs to Nirvana's Where Did You Sleep Last Night gave me something I needed. I'm not the same person I was in my 20s, but then again, a part of the younger me still exists. I miss having butterflies in my stomach and that intangible feeling of potential and excitement - like anything can happen. It's easy as a parent to get so caught up in parenting that you forget the other facets of who you were and what brought you to this point. But we all have the fire in the belly somewhere deep down. It gets buried sometimes beneath Elmo videos and sliced bananas and bath time, but a little spark is still there, waiting to be ignited. I just need a little time to myself, every so often, to find it again. And once I do, there's nothing better than seeing my family burst in the door yelling, "mama, mama, mamaaaa!!!!".
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