The joys -- and the emptiness -- of solitude

It seems like an eternity ago now, but for a brief time, between roommates and a husband, I lived by myself.

After the initial shock wore off (I can shower with the door open! I can take my shoes off and leave them in the middle of the floor and only I will trip over them!) and the initial worry (What if I choke to death on a bite of this pizza and I'm only found after the smell of my decaying body alerts the neighbors?), I reveled in my aloneness.

I loved the quiet. I loved the orderliness. I loved that any mess was a mess of my very own doing.

But then I got married. And had a baby. And another baby. And I haven't been alone for more than an hour or so in more than five years.

While I welcome those very rare hours of solitude when Brent takes the boys with him to the store or the three of them go on a hike together, that type of solitude is very different from the type of solitude that comes with truly being alone -- for days or longer.

When you have small children, you look at an hour of alone time not as a leisurely 60 minutes for lounging on the couch. Instead, it is a marathon to see how much you can finish before your family crosses the threshold again. Because it is amazing -- amazing -- what I can accomplish in an hour without having to stop and negotiate arguments, find and fix toys, attend to various new wounds, assist with bathroom needs, explain how airplanes stay in the sky and why father deer are never with their babies, and -- did I mention -- having to stop and negotiate arguments.

So when my mother-in-law announced she was planning to visit and wanted to take us all camping, and I realized I had some work commitments that couldn't be rescheduled, I said to my husband, "Why don't you take the boys and go without me?"

I'll admit there was a part of me that hemmed and hawed and worried that I would be forever scarring my children by sending them into the woods without me. But there was a much bigger part of me that said something like this: "YAHOO! Four days and three nights of blissful, glorious, idyllic solitude! Whatever will I do with all of that time?"

And then the boys left. Old habits die hard, so my first order of business was to clean the house and pick up toys that were scattered in nearly every room. Then I just stepped back and thought, "What next?"

Fortunately, the phone started ringing. A friend needed me to take her and her family to the airport. I stopped for a minute, wondering what to do with my own kids since we wouldn't all fit in the car, when I realized, "I don't have to think about child care!"

When another friend asked me to attend a yoga class with her at night, I stopped and thought about having to get dinner on the table before I realized, "I only have to get dinner on the table for me! And I can eat at midnight if I so choose!"

When another friend asked me to go out for drinks, I thought about getting home in a timely fashion to help get the boys in bed before I realized, "I can go out drinking all night long and nobody will care!"

Not that I actually probably could go out drinking all night long anymore. But the opportunity was there.

So there was the yoga and the drinking and the airport drop-off, but there was also curry for lunch and dinner with no one complaining about how bad my food smelled. There were long, hot showers without anyone peeling back the shower curtain to see where I was. There was actual thought put into a book selection at the library instead of just haphazardly grabbing something off the shelf as I chased my toddler through the stacks. There was a leisurely No Sweat Café breakfast with enough coffee to cause heart palpitations.

There was also quiet, a noise to which I am no longer accustomed. And I realized that I missed the little voices and their incessant questions and rambling associations about cottage cheese and bunny rabbits and the neighbor's house. There was also orderliness, a state our home, in which we have lived since Mike was a baby, has perhaps never been in. And I realized, when I stumbled on a construction site under the dining room table, how I missed making dinner amidst fire trucks and ladders hooked to all my cupboards.

That first night of solitude, I stopped in the boys' room to check on their blissfully sleeping figures, as is my nightly habit before I crawl into bed myself. As I stared at their beds, I was struck by how small and very empty their beds seemed. And I realized, not for the first time, how small and empty my life seems without them.

Sara Groves is a weekly columnist for the Independent Record. Check out her updated blog online in the "Community" menu at helenair.com.