Cycles

I miss writing, but there's just no time in the day. I feel transported back to my mid-20s, when I worked from 6 in the morning to 9 at night--and loved every minute of it. Along came M, and a swift shift in priorities and interest, and work was a necessary burden and distraction. And then L, and then unemployment, and then a series of make-do jobs that were also necessary and distracting. But this one: I'm at my desk at 6pm, and the hallways are emptying out, and I want nothing more than to turn on the radio and stay for another three hours. Every single night.

It's a strange and unsettling turn of events, not only because I'd never have imagined coming full circle this way, but also, of course, because it's difficult to say out loud that I have had to suppress this impulse that has, attached to it, a vague annoyance about having to deal with quarreling, messy kids at the end of the day. A vague avoidance. I will stamp it out--I will get the balance back, and get home early enough to give them time, etc. But the impulses run counter to what I thought I knew about myself as a parent.

There's a clubbiness, too, in the after-hours team. It's all senior staff--three or four of us, including the top guy--and I like being part of that. I like the subtle approval that comes with working those hours--I like countering what everybody thinks they know about single parents. It's been so long. It's a little addictive.

My boss is struggling with his wife: they have one child, but she wants another. She is 35 and he is 50, and therein lies the issue, basically: he's done. We were driving together into the city and I told him about waking up two days after I'd brought L home with a weight like a cement block on my chest and the horrible thought: "I've made a huge mistake." It was too much--too, too much--and it was forever. A little post-partum-type stuff, maybe--because of course we can't tag these normal feelings from a healthy woman--and it passed in a few days. I agreed with him: it's not a casual step. Not by any measure. But I also told him that it turns out L is the child who brings me the most comfort--the easy one, the sunny one. I didn't say that however quarrelsome and messy they might be, I know they're the real thing for me: the final, ultimate thing.

Hearing him talk the way he did was the reality moment for me: this is a guy who'll never be a great parent--a guy who loves his son, but resents the time his son requires. I don't want to be that person. That's not the choice I will make. But it's remarkable to realize how close I've come to it.

***
My mother goes in for a knee replacement next week, and the kids were asking her if kids were allowed in the hospital. She remembered a time years ago, when I was two and had to have eye surgery--a time when mothers weren't allowed to stay with their children in the hospital.

"I remember walking down the hall out of the hospital, and I could hear her crying, 'Mommy! Mommy!'" Her voice got thick and she started to cry, and then I started to cry, because even now nothing moves me more than evidence that my mother loves me.

***
I am taking the children to Ireland in June--going with my mother and my sisters to the village of my mother's childhood. She's been back only once since she left at age 13, and I wasn't with her. The kids have never flown across the ocean before--not counting the flight from India, which is a legend, not a memory--and they're both excited and terrified. I hadn't planned on going: I don't really have the money right now, and I don't want to take the time. But again: the flash of reality--that this is probably my mother's last trip home, and my last chance to see it with her.

"I'm going to see if we can come," I told her one night last week, and she turned to me--my funny, quick, unsentimental, fast-moving mother--and hugged me and she wasn't breathing: she was holding her breath so she wouldn't cry. It's a trick she has, and I do it too.