Boston – It happens several times a year:
My husband takes a 10-day business trip to India, leaving me to juggle my own life, work, and the family alone. For the first few days he’s gone, I slip into frenetic survival mode.
I tuck my three children into my chest and imagine the four of us are a pack of homeless dogs or a band of boy scouts, setting off for a week in the woods with nothing but a bag of almonds and a metal trowel.
“We’ll be OK,” I say in my gravelly dramatic internal voice.
I overbuy easy-steam vegetables at the grocery store. I bring home packages of colourful striped paper straws, hoping they will jazz up mealtimes without my husband around to temper the clock. In reality, my kids only play with those straws, flicking rivulets of milk at the dog.
Waiting becomes a state of mind.
In the evenings, I have no back up, no partner to help me fix the things I’ve unwittingly lost or broken during the day: the dishwasher, my phone charger, my middle son’s tender heart.
Even so, there is one tacit relief in temporary solo parenting. For those 10 days, my partner does not slip back into the house each night, signalling in his mild, gentle way that he’d like us to move over and make room for him in the family fray. It can be easier to dump things into the passenger seat of my car without leaving an empty space for the adult who sometimes sits there.
Across a 12-hour time difference, we communicate in syncopated transmissions.
How are you? I love you. The bed is cold.
We both can do without the blathered details I normally scatter into the air as his head hits the pillow.
“The kids are asking about you again,” I write via text message, sending a nugget of truth he can pick up and inspect between meetings or calls. (I don’t say that one of them asked whether Dad would be home by spring, four months away.)
I make a non-plan for Saturday. My toddler pads to my bedside before dawn, followed by his older sister and brother. We linger, poking and tickling each other until the dog starts pawing the side of the bed, telling us it’s time for breakfast. The kids choose whatever empty carbohydrates they can find on the pantry shelf: Grape Nuts, bagels, saltines - I don’t care. In the evening when they’re still in their pajamas, I let them pile together in the bath for 45 minutes until their fingers are cockled like dates and the bathroom floor is slick with suds.
On Monday morning, we video chat from the living room floor. I set up my laptop on the coffee table and start the call. My 2-year-old pushes his way in front.
“Hi Daddy!” he yells into the camera, jumping up and down on my ankles.
“I think you’re his favourite parent right now, Dad,” my 9-year-old daughter explains.
“What’s that smell?” someone says.
I stand up and circle the living room, ferreting olfactory clues until I nearly step in one - the dog has pooped on the floor.
Next, the computer screen goes dark - the power is out in my husband’s hotel again, terminating his Wifi connection and our conversation. My 2-year-old wails, rejecting consolation. I don’t wait for a call back - I close my laptop and focus on breakfast. We’re on day five now, and we’ve hammered out our routine. It varies slightly each day, but my motto remains the same: When things start falling off the rails, you move on.
On Tuesday night, I line up four melamine plates on the counter and fill each of them with a veggie burger, a bundle of green beans, and a squirt of ketchup - my husband is not there to remind me affectionately that this is how I ate in graduate school before I learned to love cooking. Nor does he point out that the recycling bag is full, its journey to the garage on pause by the back door.
By Wednesday, the kids are setting the table and clearing their dishes consistently. My 6-year-old son packs the car with heavy sacks of garbage that we haul to the town dump. My daughter gets herself up and dressed each morning, rather than waiting, like a queen, to be roused from bed.
Eventually, the sport of going it alone drags on. I go to sleep later each night, avoiding my empty bed. I function at scrupulous speed, ignoring all the half-chewed negligibles nagging for my attention.
On Friday afternoon, my husband walks through the door while we’re sitting on the couch reading books. He is weary, having travelled for more than 24 hours and going back in time to find us where we are. He stands in the foyer, relief in his smile, the air around him still fragrant with unfamiliar things: jet fuel and marigolds, jasmine from the hotel hand wash. His skin is humid from mingling with strangers in dank, airless spaces across oceans.
My toddler kicks wildly, flexing his feet.
“Daddy’s home!” he screeches.
He stretches one hand toward his father, beckoning; with the other hand, he pats the narrow slot on the couch between his lap and mine. He looks up at me and says it so clearly I cannot ignore,
“Scooch, please.”
Happily, I do.
Washington Post
* Shanley, a Boston-based writer, editor and mother of three, also blogs about parenting at Simtasia.