Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2004-08-08 - 10:04 a.m.

Homecoming

My girls come home tonight. They've been with their father for two weeks, the longest time either one of them has spent away from home. I pick them up tonight after work. I've missed them. How long do you think it will be before I get cross with them? I'm thinking an hour. Maybe less.

I have missed them, though. I've missed them a lot. I've missed them in that way that maybe only parents understand; maybe only SINGLE parents. It's not like I sat down to dinner and thought, "Gee, I sure wish those two adolescent smartmouthed argumentative sullen bickering whining incredibly picky eaters were here right now." I never got up in the morning and thought, "Oh, I sure wish I had to drive somebody somewhere today." I didn't wander aimlessly around the house saying, "Isn't anybody bored? Where are the bored people today?" It just wasn't like that.

Everyone asked, when they heard the girls were away, "Do you miss them?" I always said I did, and it was true, but it was also enough not-true that I felt an odd twinge saying it. I guess I felt like I ought to be able to say I did, I did terribly, so bereft that I'd been completely unable to eat or sleep, that I'd only been able to wander the house picking up their little socks and weeping, that I was living only for the day they'd come home. That would have felt like the perfect maternal thing to say. But I wasn't.

I missed them in the way you might miss a lost tooth, I think. They're something that's supposed to be here, supposed to be part of what I do and what I think and how I plan, and they weren't here, and that never felt quite right. I woke up and wondered if they were up and why I hadn't heard them, and then remembered they weren't here; I got off work and late and felt stressed for a moment because they were waiting for me, only they weren't. It wasn't bad, only not quite right, and I knew I was waiting like you'd wait for the other shoe, waiting until they got back and accused me of moving their stuff and losing their phone messages, until things were back right again. Back the way they're supposed to be.

But mixed in with that, I partied. I wallowed in not going to the grocery store, and in spending so little when I did go. I rolled around in not having much laundry and in having a small box of cookies in the pantry for two full weeks. I reveled in owning my own computer and my own phone line and in not having heard any hip-hop at all, even by accident. I stopped off at places after work becase no one was waiting for me, and I had nothing at all in the house for breakfast and loved it. It was a party made up mostly of things I didn't do, didn't have to do, rather than things I did, and I enjoyed every solitary minute of it.

I don't think I would tell the girls that. I don't think they would quite understand yet. Of course, they won't ask - they're beginning to be old enough to ask me how my day was occasionally, but mostly they still figure I'm in deep-freeze when they're not around, or not doing anything remotely interesting. And I've spoken to them by phone, so they know I've been working, and I know exactly who at day camp is nice and who isn't and who said what to whom and how much it hurt someone's feelings and what that person said last year that might have provoked it and what they're planing to say or do to get back at that person and so on and so forth, all further confused by "camp names" like Sassy and Willow and the fact that I don't know any of these girls. So I think we're up to date. They missed me, but probably mostly in an offhand way, except when their father yelled at them, at which point they missed me a LOT, because they forget that I yell, too. They'll remember soon enough.

Tonight. Less than twelve hours, and we'll be back in the grocery-laundry-taxi routines. I'll be glad to see them. I missed them.

�

previous - next

�