To you stay-at-home moms out there, ever have one of those moments where all your kids are somewhere else while you're at home doing whatever and then you COMPLETELY FREAK OUT BECAUSE WHERE THE @#&#%*! ARE MY KIDS? You think for a second that maybe they're napping, but wait, it's morning, or they're outside, but wait the swing set is empty, or OH NO I HAVE LOST THEM! But then you remember. They're somewhere else (like a friend's house or something) and you, while crazy, are not a bad mother who has misplaced them somewhere. I mean, I've tried explaining that one to Nate and boy, it never goes well. "So wait...what happened to the kids?" "Uh, I had them just a minute ago. Let's see--I was in the kitchen and I think I set one of them down on the counter. I could have sworn the other one was in my bag..."
So I'm having a quiet morning here with my poptart while T is at summer camp and a good friend is having Sethie come over and play with her two-year-old and after about every third bite of delicious nutrition-free frosted berry sweetness, the quietness gets to me and I do the WHERE THE @#&^*! ARE MY KIDS? freak-out. All summer, I've always had one of them with me. While T is at summer camp, Sethie is at home. While Sethie is napping, T and I work on reading. After Sethie gets up, the three of us go bike-riding or pool-swimming or backyard squirrel-scaring--you know something appropriately summery--and then we have dinner and they trade bedtime stories for a little extra Wii Lego Batman action and then they go to bed and I take a breath and Nate comes home.
I AM NEVER ALONE.
What do you do when you're alone? I was going to clean my upstairs bathroom this morning. Oh yeah. To be clear, I'm not some kind of clean freak who gets excited to get rid of the kids for a moment so they will stop polluting my pristine environment. That bathroom hasn't been cleaned for at least two weeks. Maybe longer. The bathtub grout mold is sprouting condominiums. The soap has fuzzies. Yesterday, the leftover hair clippings from Nate's razor picked it up and walked off with it Lilliputian-style and I haven't seen it since. So yeah, I should probably clean the bathroom while there is no one around to bug me.
At some point, I am going to be alone a lot more. T is starting full-time school this fall and Sethie is going into a two day a week preschool and I will become, at least for six hours a week, unnecessary to their immediate well being. I can't clean the bathroom twice a week (okay, I probably could, but I'm not going to). Besides, the cleaning never really ends. Clean something once and in a few hours it has become uninhabitable again. (well, uninhabitable for humans over the age of 21. Pint-sized miters can live quite comfortably in heaps of dirty laundry for many months, so long as they have remembered to pack in crackers and peanut butter) So that's a waste of free time. I have other things I used to more aggressively pursue: writing, and reading, and game programming, and pastry-baking, and violin-playing, and etc. and furthermore and whatnot. Is that who I still am?
If so, why in my free time am I still wondering WHERE THE @&%#*@&! ARE MY KIDS?
