Facility

I recently went away for ten days. This is not usual for me. I have never left my youngest for half this amount of time, let alone to be by myself for some of it.

But I had decided to go to a writers conference in New York and then continue on to meet my husband at my older son’s spring training in Florida.

I was anxious about leaving for any number of reasons — would my youngest have an emergency while I was across the country? Would my high schooler skip breakfast or have car trouble? And, importantly and preoccupyingly, would the writers conference be very scary?

Needing a pep talk, I talked to my parents on the phone the night before I left (because, as my youngest tells me “Mommy, you might be a woman, but you’re still a girl on the inside!”). I told my parents I’d call them from the conference if anyone hurt my feelings. My dad said, “Oh good — we’ll hear from you everyday.”

The morning I was leaving the house, I hugged my daughter and started to cry — this when I’d had such high hopes of being a woman who blows in and out of her house like a soft breeze, easy, natural, doing just what it’s meant to.

But of course those hopes were miscast because motherhood is subsuming, a fact that when my kids were younger, I was often too busy or tired to notice. I easily lost track of me, forgetting the last time I’d talked about…