Just They, Myself and I.

Eight days *solo with my kids

This Mother’s Day, I got a week plus of all the parenting while my husband went to Ireland with his own mom (shout out to MIL extraordinairess Bibi!). All the breakfast smoothies, and all the washing of the breakfast smoothie glasses and fiddly straws. All the combing of all the hair nests, and all of the not combing and wondering if the teachers clock me as an unfit mother. All the chapters of The Chocolate Touch. All the kitty litter scooping. All the one-more-tuck-ins. All the “I hate you!”s

I picked up a few onigiri molds at Daiso the first day, and so onigiri quickly became a feverish trend in our household. That meant all the rice, all the dicing fix-ins, all the wrapping in seaweed and attempting to keep warm and inhaling the scent of uneaten ones as I rinsed out their lunch bags at the end of another long day of all the things (I have been knocked off of my school lunch high-horse by my kids’ recent refusal to eat it, sigh).

Of course, I didn’t really solo parent this week. Miriam and Sebastian picked my son up for school every morning so that my daughter could tell me I was the worst mom in the world for trying to get her to wear clothes IN PEACE. Ed picked my son up from school one day, and got both kids dressed and fed and safely on their way to learning on the morning I had to go into the city early to teach. Julia, of grocery swap fame, brought rations. Tak and Rachel took the little one for dinner and what seemed to be hours of imaginary play as a family of pieces of poop (I believe clay was involved). And “Counselor Nick,” for a reasonable fee, brought his Playstation over and played Minecraft with my kids while I went out Friday night and Sunday day. Community for the win!

On Mother’s Day itself, I went to my dance class, with the slower, more spiritual instructor who asked us “what kind of ancestor do you want to be?” to which I cried, and had us chant “I am free!” to Florence and The Machine. I took myself out to brunch, read the Sunday Times (with a hilarious and stars-to-me-studded piece on Mother’s Day cards by KAFKA'S BABY’s Janet Manley.) I went shopping, just a smidge.

I have to say it was alarming, almost, how well eight days alone with my kids felt. It was still hard. I completely forgot about at least three important things, wore the same clothes a couple days in a row, said “I’m sorry” maybe too many times to all the people who covered for me, worried that I came off as not the “doing-it-all” mom an omniscient but quite stupid voice tells me I should be.

But I was aware, in the relative ease of it all, of two things. One — that I have been, for years, nothing short of ROCKED by the emotions of parenting. I am used to completely melting the fuck down, honestly, after a few days alone with my children who are delightful and complex and well-meaning and cannot, at times, leave each other alone. Melting down is okay, too. But it sure does feel bad, day after day, like an entire system reboot is required, emergency shut down, force quit, command + option + escape please. This time I wanted rest. I wanted a housecleaner. But I didn’t want to crawl out of my skin, most of the time.

i also pulled off — with friends and neighbors! — participating in a neighborhood yardsale and a few people took us up on my son’s enticing cat petting incentive

I just finished two small, beautiful books published by Transit Books as part of their Undelivered Lectures series (I wouldn’t know anything about that — I deliver all of my lectures whether they are wanted or not lol). I adore a little book! See Phillip Maciak’s Avidly Reads Screen Time or Julietta Singh’s The Breaks.

In Motherhood and Its Ghosts, Iman Mersal explores the meaning of mother images, starting with the one photograph she has of herself with her own mother, who died when she was a young child. In it, I learned about the “hidden mothers” that were popular in Victorian portraits of children — covered in black shrouds or hiding in boxes, propping their children up as they dissolved into the shadows. Others have written about these "invisible women” and the erasure of motherhood, it is a metaphor too close for comfort and incredibly haunting.

Photographs from “Hidden Mother,” by Laura Larson; this image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston

In The Wilderness, Ayşegül Savaş recounts her first 40 days of motherhood, which were not the blissful imprinting times we are told we should be having. She writes about how some cultures think of this time as an exorcism, others a kind of transformation. I felt uncomfortably seen by her descriptions of her lack of connection to her new role and to her baby, of her simultaneous desperation for and distrust of advice. She writes about each day as a mountain:

“They were, I now realized, layered and complex, inexplicable and analogous to nothing. Each time I reached the place that I thought was the top . . . there was still more up to go. . . . I was entirely in new terrain.”

Being alone with my children, actually, being with them at all, though it was more glaring without the distraction of other people, has often felt like this to me. But as they get older, as I get not wiser but perhaps wise to the equanimity of it all, the mountains aren’t quite as high.

I think I forgot the other thing. Something about loving co-parenting with my husband but also loving my own little carve-outs with my kids. When we watched Wayne’s World, and my son fell asleep talking to himself about Bugs Bunny in a dress and giggling, I thought I could just expire right there, right in that moment, that we had shared something that might make up for all of the years I was desperate to get away from him. Or maybe he forgot, too.

That might have the real gift of Mother’s Day, that I inhabited it all by myself, as the sturdy leader or whatever the fuck we’re supposed to be, or at least, as grounded in a way that was meaningful to me.

It wasn’t. The real gift was the vintage purse and lacy sheer Limited shirt from the 90s that I bought myself! I will post pics as soon as I have the chance to go out on the town again.

i can almost smell this delia*s catalogue

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Also, this:

This is my new favorite “Me Myself and I” adjacent song. Listening on repeat.