“Wow, I can’t believe you are leaving your kids for five days. The one time I left my girls it took everything I had in me to go.” This was said to me less than a week before a ladies’ trip to Costa Rica and, with a delay long enough for me to say: “No, it’s good for me and good for them,” it crushed me with a tsunami of guilt I thought I had long overcome. I even felt guilty about not initially feeling guilty.
I am hugely privileged in the amount of time I spend both with and without my children; my gratitude for this is beyond words. I work part-time and my schedule revolves around theirs; their vacations are my vacations and I almost never miss an event at school or extracurricular activity. I also have the opportunity and support to travel with my spouse, for work, and with friends for short stints. I relish the time together and (try to) relax during the time apart.
I must admit, when my older daughter turned 9 the sense that we were likely beyond the half-way point of our time together hit me hard. It’s hard from my perspective to understand the complaints of parents of tweentysomethings (not a typo) whose children have moved back home post-college. How bad can it be? They will leave eventually, right? I dole out my time away in tiny, well-spaced packets and often find myself booking later flights on departure and earlier on arrival, leaving conference early, etc. Once when faced with the prospect of being stuck in Atlanta for an extra day or two, I elected to rent a car with colleague and drive home through the night.
Despite the anxiety and the guilt, I know that the time away is important—important for my career, my relationships, and my children. I always remember why I married my husband, but even just one night and one morning all to ourselves reminds me why I fell in love with him. You want your children to know that there is a world for you beyond their world, a space for you out of their space, and that there are other people who need and love you, people you need and love back. Your kids should understand that your presence and opinion are valued beyond the walls of your home.
When needed or wanted elsewhere, the day-to-day functioning of the home front cannot be left to chance. A source of great amusement to my friends and relatives is the tome The Daily Mayman, crafted with obsessive care for each trip. Five spaces of closely typed instructions, schedules, activity suggestions, algorithms (“If child A is constipated then… If child B has a fever…”), contact numbers from neighbors to our family lawyers and everyone in between, demographics, health data (height, weight, blood types, allergies). It is the mama data—all the things we know about our kids and our families that no one else does or can. If their exceptional daddy is home with them–he is exceptionally adept and exceptionally patient—even he doesn’t know their shoe size off the top of his head. Forget the baby book or their pediatrician’s charts, The Daily Mayman is the most comprehensive developmental record of my girls and our family, their state of being and my state of mind.
Some things I cannot outsource or trust to surrogate caregivers. The little one has a raging crush on a boy her class and I am the only one who knows the child in question. We discuss and dissect their interactions every night while I am tucking her in. I know that puppy love must be handled sensitively and deftly—she gets her romantic inclinations from me, after all.
Facebook, Facetime, Viber, etc make it easier to stay connected. I remember my parents going away and I would not hear from them for a week. I love that still get to the see my daughters’ sweet faces and hear their voices even when across the globe.
My girls and I travel together often, so the Jet Blue terminal at JFK is like our terminal and being there without them always feels strange. I know the exact place just past security where my daughter Tanys will turn around and say: “Can we buy a book?” I automatically grab my daughter Sloane’s favorite California rolls off the shelf at CIBO express before remembering she is at home in bed or at school. My awareness of them never leaves me, no matter if I am giving a presentation at work or taking a yoga class in the treetops of Costa Rica.
Despite exhortations to the contrary (from my husband or a yoga instructor or my friends), I can never quiet my mind because a mother’s mind is never quiet. During my absences, I embrace my unquiet mind during the quiet time and prepare myself for the perfect storm of love (from children, husband, and an exhausted grandparent or two), anger (at my absence), and guilt (endogenous and exogenous) that will assault me upon my return home. Don’t worry about me; mothers don’t need treetop yoga to maintain their balance under this deluge. After all, we are the ones who invented the guilt trip.
Lani Serota is a city mom madly in love with her two daughters, her husband, and New York City.
