Sometimes something will be on my mind, upsetting me, and I’ll tell Kendrick about it, and even as the words are coming out of my mouth I’ll know what the answer is. One of the best side-effects about writing a blog is that it has made me work much, much harder to figure out the reality behind situations that can feel unmanageable – both because I spend a lot of time circling around issues in my head, making sure I’ve unpacked them completely, before ever sitting down to write…and also because I answer lots and lots of reader questions here that have forced me to go back and explore similar situations from my own past in an attempt to figure out what was really going on.
I know exactly what’s going on with this thing that’s on my mind. But knowing what’s going on and being able to understand it on a deep-down level are two different things.
I love watching my son and my husband playing. I love how much they love each other; I love what an incredible father Kendrick is; I love how completely obsessed Indy is with every single thing that Kendrick says and does. But in the past couple of weeks something new has happened, and it’s that my son no longer wants very much to do with me when his dad is around. He wants daddy to pick him up, wants daddy to play with him; he cries when Kendrick takes so much as a step into the other room, and having me hold him instead doesn’t seem to be a comfort. When Kendrick isn’t around it’s totally business as usual – snuggling, lots of “lah doo Mama”s (that’s “love you” in two-year-old-speak), laughing and playing and wonderful…but when Kendrick comes back, my son jumps straight out of my arms and into my husband’s.
I understand this completely. I know what I would say to a reader if she wrote this to me in an email. I would say this:
“Children go through phases, and it’s completely normal for them to want to be with one parent more than another for a period of time – especially when that parent is suddenly away more than usual. It doesn’t mean that they love you any less, and it doesn’t have grand, far-reaching implications. It makes sense that it hurts, but you need to focus on the reality, and the reality is that you’re dealing with a toddler who loves you unconditionally and whose actions are not necessarily reflective of his feelings or intentions.”
I know all of this, and it still crushes me when my son is crying and my arms aren’t enough to make him stop.
And I can’t talk to Kendrick about it, because his response – understandably – is to tell me that Indy loves me, and of course I know that. And hearing someone try to “convince me” of it makes me feel simultaneously silly and sad and disappointed in myself for even needing to talk about this at all.
Yesterday morning, I sat down to email my friend Morgan – who used to live just down the street from me on the UES and now lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children under the age of two – and started to update her about work and life and blah blah blah…and then I stopped, deleted it all, and wrote this:
I knew that she would know that I was simultaneously kidding and a little bummed out, and what she wrote back was not how to “fix things” or that “everything is fine”, but rather – in essence – “oh my god me too.” Which was exactly what I needed to hear.
These past few weeks…I’ve been lonely. It comes with the self-employed territory and with the husband-in-school territory, and it’s just one small negative in a whole field of things that are very obviously good, but it’s still not the best feeling in the world. I realized this a couple of weeks ago, when I pulled off the road into a farmstand and bought myself a bouquet just because it was pretty, and almost cried when I realized that I was actually buying it because I felt very alone and I thought that flowers might make feeling alone feel better.
Lately, for whatever reason, it’s just felt easier to stay home, to get through the workday and then play with my son and watch Under the Dome by myself and then fall asleep and get up and do it all over again, rarely exchanging more than a handful of non-emailed sentences with someone over the age of two. But I think that it’s important – essential, even – that I try to push back against this, because I can tell that something about this mini self-imposed isolation is what’s making it hard for me to handle my son reaching away from me – a thing that he will (and should) do countless times as he grows and becomes more and more independent. Part of it is just that he’s providing such an enormous percentage of my emotional companionship at the moment – of course Kendrick is there for me and I’m there for him, but we’re both so busy at the moment that the fact is that there’s less daily interaction between us than I’m used to – and so when he turns from me, it’s shattering.
I’ve heard all the “it’s hard to make friends when you’re a parent” talk, but it’s more than that: yes, it’s super hard to make friends as a parent…but it’s also easy to forget that you need friends at all. You prioritize family (of course), and work (of course), but put off that drink or that dinner for next week, next month, when you have a little more time (which ends up being never).
I need to make the time. I realized that two weeks ago, standing in that farmstand, and the next day I changed my return flight from Los Angeles (where I’m headed in a couple of weeks) so that I could stay an extra couple of days and visit with some old friends who I haven’t seen in a very long time. I hired a sitter and had a Girls’ Night with my friends Jeannine and Katie. I made dates with friends who live in the city to come up and visit, and scheduled a dinner with my aunt. It’s good. Necessary.
But not seeing Morgan is still a big thing that’s missing. We were pregnant together, then had our first babies together, and in some ways she and I understand this part of each other’s lives more than almost anyone else. I miss her so much.
So we were chatting away on the phone, going on about how great it would be to spend a few hours helping each other with the kids and just hanging out like we used to, and then I realized:
I have frequent flier miles, a son who is under the age of 2 and thus free to fly with for exactly three more weeks, and a computer that lets me work in any state I feel like booting it up in. And when I went onto Delta I saw that there was one Skymiles seat left on a Sunday morning plane to San Francisco.
And so I booked it.
It’s a cliche, but a true one: it’s very easy, as a parent, to put yourself last. This makes sense, because the fact is that your child’s needs are more immediate and – let’s face it – more important. But sometimes it’s also important to take a moment to check in on those relationships that remind you that there was a “you” for a long, long time before there was a “we”. Grown-up friendships can be hard to find and harder still to maintain, but they’re so worth the work. It’s a good thing to remember, and – as a nice little bonus – a great lesson for a child to learn.
