Home Alone - Six Hours of Solitude

When Rick and I mapped out our plans for last Saturday, it all sounded fine to me: he and Tim had a baseball game, so Holly and I would spend the afternoon with Rick’s family at his sister and brother-in-law’s house, where they would all be celebrating our niece’s fifth birthday.

But when I saw the e-mail from Tim’s coach saying the game had been postponed, my heart leaped with joy. “Now you can take the kids to the party and I can stay home!” I crowed. And that’s how I ended up having a Home Alone afternoon on Saturday, nearly six blissful hours of solitude.

I wasn’t exactly pursuing what I would consider a self-indulgent agenda. Although thoughts of movies, naps, long bike rides, manicures or Starbucks with my laptop flitted briefly through my head, I put myself to work from the moment they left. I cleaned the kitchen, swept the floors, picked up the kids’ rooms and our room, put away everyone’s clean laundry, weeded the flowerbeds and then loaded up the truck with trash and recycling and took a trip to the transfer station. (Thanks to the fact that our monthly visit from our house cleaner is next week, I didn’t feel compelled to start scrubbing bathrooms, which was a lucky break.)

And yet the hours of household labor made the solitude no less blissful. At other times of year, I might not see an afternoon of cleaning and tidying and yard work as such a pleasure, but this summer has been so kid-intensive that just having the silence of an empty house was all the novelty I really needed.

At this stage in my life, I don’t generally suffer from a deficit of time to myself. During the school year, the kids are out of the house six hours a day, and I’m at my desk writing, with plenty of peace and quiet even on the frequent days that Rick works at home. But this summer, time alone has been unusually hard to come by. Both sets of grandparents have been wonderful, as they always are, about taking the kids for visits, excursions or overnights, and both kids get frequent invitations from friends, but generally when one is out, the other is home. One afternoon when my mother took both kids to a movie, I found myself tied up with unplanned work-related phone calls for almost the full three hours. Being with the kids is mostly a pleasure these days, not a chore. But the fact remains that I’ve been getting very little solitude.

So when the door closed behind them, I was as eager and excited to roll up my sleeves and start some intensive housework as I normally am to leave on a vacation or try out a new restaurant. I was just so happy to be by myself. When the kids were preschoolers, I used to sometimes say to them, “I just need two minutes alone with my brain.” Meaning, I just need a little bit of time with no noise clutter, no demands on my attention: just a moment to focus on one thing that isn’t you. Saturday afternoon I felt the same way. Even though what I needed to think about was where to store Tim’s extra baseball pants and how to organize Holly’s many art supplies, that was all I wanted, a little time alone with my brain.

They came home cheerful and tired from the party. No one commented on the work I’d done – not the weed-free flower beds, not the empty recycling bins in the garage, not the fact that the carpet in Holly’s room was visible once again for the first time in weeks – but I didn’t care. I knew the house and grounds had been restored to a state of tidiness, and I’d had five precious hours free of all clamor.

We’re just about halfway through summer vacation; it was a little like the All-Star Break in Major League Baseball, the baseball-free day that every player has just prior to the All-Star Game. Like a baseball player, I ended it feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to play my best game for the second half of the summer.

I love being with my kids, but I love being with my brain too, and sometimes it feels like I can have only one or the other. Gratitude prevailed on Saturday as I basked in the serenity of a kid-free house. It was only a half-day, but I think it’s enough to tide me over until September.