Learning to live alone

For most of my life I have not ever been really alone. Sometimes it looked like I was alone, but it was an illusion. The children were sleeping and the house was quiet, but my mind was occupied with thoughts of laundry or doctor visits or next weeks’ activities. Even when my family wasn’t physically with me, they filled my conscious thoughts and plans.

In the midst of all this, I often found time to feed my creative side. Reading late at night (or even sometimes all day), cross-stitch or other handwork projects while waiting for music lessons to end, learning alongside my children in our homeschooling adventure. But the time was always carved out and I was never fully alone. Instead, during those times, my life was temporarly paused.

This is not to say that I never felt lonely. Cliche I know, but “alone” and “lonely”, although they may (or may not) occur at the same time, are not the same. It is also possible to feel bone aching lonliness surrounded by others or lying in bed next to the one you have promised ’till death do you part’.

Then came the Year of Changes. A tsunami hit and nothing was recognizable. The marriage was officially over. I was a shell of a mother, functioning on auto-pilot (and not very well at that). Our address changed and then changed again. The younger boys entered public school. The oldest spread his wings and moved away from my nest. I learned to spend my days working in a corporate office. For the most part, whether I was physically alone or not, the only thing I felt was numb and the most creative activity I could think of was sleep.

Gradually, in fits and spurts, we all started to heal. The kids have grown and more have sprouted wings. Most of the time older children do not require the same sort of intense mothering that toddlers and pre-teens do. They spend more time away from home and, although one never really stops thinking of them, worrying on occasion, wondering often what they’re up to, they no longer fill every corner of my thoughts. My plans no longer center solely on their needs and schedule.

If we’ve done your job right as a parent, children are supposed to grow up and become independent. Oh, they never stop needing us, but how they need changes.  While there was once a day when we planned their every waking moment, now they make plans without even consulting us. Although it is right and good and The Way Life Should Be, as the children grow, you find yourself spending time alone.

2008 has been the year that I have learned to live alone. Three out of my four children no longer live at home full time and the fourth often spends days at a time away. I spent New Years, the Fourth of July and my birthday alone. I had the apartment totally to myself for weeks at a time. And mostly, I’ve liked it.

There certainly are days when that bone chilling lonliness attaches itself like a leech on my soul, but those days are much fewer and farther between. Instead I’ve learned to appreciate the silence, to listen and begin to remember who I am.  This has been a year of restoration, a time to let the me that has been hidden for so long to begin to bud and bloom.