Gone

Warning: lots of self-indulgent emoting and navel-gazing follows.

The house is quiet—much to MAL’s relief—and I don’t need to try to keep up with changing pood preferences for meals any more. No more shushing people after quiet time, no more exhortations to clean up messes or mind manners. No property or deal squabbles to try to untangle. No more creek-soggy, muddy clothes to try to clean. The snolfs have departed for their western home. They’ve missed Lobo very much, are happy to be with him, and are looking forward to their first summer in that region. One might think that I’d be happy, or at the least relieved, to have my time mostly to myself again. Truth be told, I’m pretty thoroughly miserable.

There’s a lot of “drudgery” and repetition in being a parent; and there can be a lot of frustration as well. Not wanting to be a parent for much of my younger years, I didn’t give much thought to the schtick; so I found myself quite unprepared for the role when the need arose. Now that I have embraced it, I don’t much care for the times when I can step down from it. Fortunately for me, I don’t have any serious concerns regarding Lobo’s parenting—we have differences, as any parents do, but in the main we agree on how to raise our children and I know he loves them. So it isn’t that I think or feel that I have to be the one caring for them for them to do well, nor do I have the overprotective parent’s desire to be with them every moment ... I just enjoy being the snolfs’ mom immensely.

I know I just blathered about frustrations and repetitions and such, and then stated that I enjoy being a parent; for many—especially those who aren’t parents—that probably caused a disconnect. I’ve never trained animals, so I’m not sure how well this analogy will fit, but it seems to me that a good deal of the satisfaction from parenting is seeing the development of skills, the shaping of habits, preferences, and personality that come on slowly, over weeks or months, such that one often isn’t aware that a milestone has been reached until it’s well behind one. Over these past months together, I have seen each snolf make good progress in various areas, most notably self-control and communications – especially communicating their emotions in helpful ways. I had been fussing about how short their attention spans seem, how little they seem to notice of the world around them; but as the snolfs led Lobo and me on a walk-explore, they both impressed me with all the things they observed and had learned here. Above all that, the snolfs are interesting, engaging individuals in their own ways, giving as well as receiving.

Being a full-time mom isn’t always easy; there’s been plenty of evidence submitted here in support of that, I know. With this time together, though, something changed for me ... instead of focusing on “results” (that I wanted, or Lobo and I had identified as desirable, rather than what a snolf was interested in working toward) and such, I was much more able to relax and enjoy being with my children, even when things were challenging or unpleasant. I think that, as a result of my shift, they shifted as well, because those challenges seemed to be more easily addressed than in the past. We had some genuinely rocky times, but it appears to me that we all came through them having learned something valuable. While I have enjoyed my darlin’ daughter’s frequent floral-bouquet gifts, or the feel of my dear son’s hand slipping into mine as we walk along, I have also enjoyed (in a very different sense) helping each of them work through personal challenges.

A good friend has reminded me in several contexts of the helpful idea, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. I’ve been trying very hard to do that ... knowing that Lobo has missed them intensely, and they him, and they’ll all have a lot of fun together; thinking of ways I can focus on advancing some of my projects and progress toward goals now that I’ll have uninterrupted time for them; enjoying MAL’s company more without interruptions, and knowing that he’ll be less stressed ... but right now none of that matters very much. Even though I’ll be seeing them again in about a month – they’ll be part of the aforementioned Grand Adventure – the pain (mine and theirs) of separation shrouds everything else.

I most likely won’t be around for a few days ... until the shroud lifts some.