Mama Time

Mamakat's prompt:  5.) Share something you miss from before you were a mom. (inspired by Life’s Unexpected Blessings)


I wanted to be a parent, I almost died twice to be a parent, and I do not want to stop being a parent. Zane may not be the "perfect" child, but he's mine, and that's perfect enough. I love my son.

That said, I miss my "Me" time.  As I've mentioned before, I am an introvert.  I have to be alone sometimes, to reflect, to process, to recharge.  Too much stimulation, which for me is being around other people, drains me. I am very inner-focused, and talking with more than one or two people requires an enormous effort on my part. I like people as a general rule, but only in small doses.  I work all day in a profession where interactions with others is necessary, and by the end of most days my tolerance has been sucked right out of me.  The world has jumped on my last nerve, and I just want to go home and hide.

Before I was married, I would go home after work and not speak at all. I was alone, except for my cats, and I didn't have to talk to them.  I would read, or watch television, or just go right to bed if it was a really bad day.  After I got married, it took my husband a bit to understand that I needed some decompression time to myself.  Larry would initially take my silences to mean that I was angry with him about something, and then he would 'pick' at me, trying to get me to tell him what I was mad about.  Those conversations never seemed to end well. 

But now I have a child.  A extroverted child, who wants to tell me about his day,  wants to ask me about dead bugs or snakes, and wants to be where ever I happen to be.  I can't hide in the house for long; he is pretty smart, and he always finds me, because that is what kids do.  If I decide to go for a walk, Zane wants to come as well, and I won't say no because he loves looking at rocks and trees and bugs while we walk. Larry and I also have soccer practices to go to, and PTC meetings, and birthday parties, etc., where I have to mingle and be polite to the other people even though my last ounce of energy expired two hours before. 

When Larry takes Zane on an outing, and I am alone in the house, I often spend the entire time in complete silence, soaking the quiet into my pores and storing it away for later like a solar battery.   No more decompression time for me.  My decompression time is now the five minutes before I fall asleep.  It will have to do.  But that doesn't mean that I don't miss the time that I used to have.

And I also really miss being able to sit and read a book, uninterrupted, for longer than two minutes, while not in the bathroom with the door locked.