The Rubber Band

As I prepared to leave my teaching job to stay home with Abbey, eight months pregnant with Dylan, I was so certain that some of my mommy guilt would be alleviated.

I just knew that after spending so many waking moments with them, I would be comfortable, if not eager, to leave my children with Ryan, with my parents, with the mailman if necessary, to spend time with other adults, to enjoy dinners with my girlfriends, to have some alone time.

I was wrong.  As silly as it may seem, it’s more difficult for me to leave them now.

Ryan and I occasionally have date nights; we’ve even left the munchkins overnight with Grandma and Grandpa.  Regular runs keep my sanity and sugar junkie tendencies in check.  However, most of the time, the kids are sleeping during those outings.

During the day, I may close my eyes and think about how lovely it would be to sit alone at a little table, my laptop in front of me, my tattered writer’s notebook next to my (still warm) coffee.  I may close my eyes and think about how lovely it would be to close the bathroom door when I use the facilities.

Excited to have a few hours to myself a few times a year, I schedule my hair appointments and thumb through magazines looking for hair inspiration.

Monthly dinners with girlfriends are scheduled over e-mail, and I mentally evaluate my closest for something appropriate to wear.

Walking to my car, I feel light, literally, without snacks and straw cups crowding my purse, only myself to buckle safely into the car.

I turn the radio a little louder than I would with the kids in the car, not worrying about what comes out of the speakers.

Backing down the driveway, I feel it begin.  An uncomfortable feeling, housed somewhere between my heart and my stomach.  The lightness I feel suddenly seems too light, wrong, disorienting. 

It’s as though there’s a rubber band connecting me to Abbey and Dylan.  When we’re at home, I don’t feel it, but as we’re separated, it begins to stretch, and I feel as though part of me is missing.  That invisible band is what drives me to check my cell phone obsessively when I’m away from them, what made it impossible to stop the tears as our plane taxied on the runway on our way to Vegas.

I know, rationally, that part of raising our kids means developing independent little people.  Independent little people who do not bring their mommy with them to pre-school or their first school dances or their first fraternity party.

I need to work on stretching that rubber band.

Soon.  I’ll work on that soon.