Last week an unfamiliar stillness entered our house. The house remained weirdly neat and tidy. It seemed bigger, somehow, definitely more capacious. The reason? My family had skipped town. It was just me and the silence. Not even the cat for company.
When my husband first mentioned that he might take the kids away for the first week of school holidays, I had a gut reaction. Literally. My stomach lurched dangerously before tripping over something large and hulking (my anxiety perhaps?).
'What? A holiday? Without me?' The idea seemed beyond absurd. But since I'd started a new job, and hadn't yet worked long enough to earn annual leave, the options were pretty limited. Besides, my husband was clearly in need of a break and, unlike me, he had ample leave to draw from.
'Okay,' I thought. 'Why not?' After all, the kids had had many school holidays with me so it was only fair that their father had his turn. And perhaps it wasn't such a bad idea for their dad to realise how much work was involved in entertaining a ten- and seven-year-old, which included playing referee when they tried killing each other.
Still an idea is one thing. The reality is another. On the day of their departure I covered their sad little faces with kisses. A heavy dark cloud seemed to settle on the space left behind by my husband's ute. It wasn't just that the sun had beaten a hasty retreat. For the last ten years, I'd been a mother and, before that, a wife. With them not here with me, my very identity seemed in peril. What was I without them?
My first impulse was to get busy filling in my social calendar. But something stopped me. Somehow I knew that I was just trying to stave off the inevitable: having to spend time with myself. Frankly, the thought terrified me. And with good reason, as author Helen Garner reminds us: 'A woman on her own can easily get in the habit of standing at the open fridge door ... '
Fridge or no fridge it was beyond time to rectify this, and the funny thing was that once I'd reached this conclusion I found myself defending my privacy with all the conviction of a barrister.
"Solitude is seminal in challenging the established belief that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness." —