What To DO?

So I'm on my 2nd real day of being alone alllllll day with Seth having gone into first grade. Yesterday I did laundry until my spleen hurt, and didn't leave the house until after 8:00 p.m. when I fled to Starbucks for a mocha. This morning, I'm all dude - I don't have to be anywhere until 1:00. ONE O'CLOCK.

Aloneness is something I am not used to, but am totally willing to give it my best shot. Being the mother of three boys - one who is a drummer and one who was born missing the volume control that most humans are equipped with at birth - well, let's just say I'm soaking up the quiet to make up for the past 18 years. I feel like a plant that hasn't been watered since, oh, ever.

This time was always a distant point on the horizon, like the sun at sunset - boy it sure looks close, but you can travel in that direction for the rest of your life and never reach it. Or that's how it always felt. But here I am.

I actually never even meant to be a stay-at-home parent. I was crazy ambitious in my career as an account executive for an ad agency until one day, pregnant with my second child, it was like someone slapped me and I realized that I desperately didn't want another child in daycare whom I only spent two hours a day with. I began telecommuting shortly after that, all the while losing any interest in continuing that career at all. It wasn't me anymore and I hated every second of the marketing communications world.

So the idea of becoming a stay-at-home parent crept up on me without my consent, and I began that part of my life when my second son was two years old and we had just moved across the country from everyone we knew to Houston, Texas. Great timing.

Always planning on not being in that role forever, we had our third son. Then we moved back to our home state. And said son was diagnosed with autism. Goodbye thoughts of a career again. Then I was a stay-at-home mom/therapist. The rest is history.

Now I am alone. In my house. Without a clue. I mean - a person can only do so much laundry. Or paint so many rooms. Or rearrange the furniture in so many different ways before their brain dries up.

One side of my brain says to get a job and make some money. The dominant, creative side of my brain that decides 90% of things in my life says write. You now have hours upon hours to write and do something with it.

We shall see if I can get anything worthwhile written before my brain, indeed, dries up and crumbles. Or if I get a job. Or see if the happy, sleeping sea lions would accept a blonde, blue-eyed chick as one of their own. I would be willing to give that a try, as well. I'm just that flexible.

But just so you know - this is all very weird.

photo by Natalie Killian