Home Alone

Most people experience it when their children are young, but today is the first day in almost 14 years that both of my children have gone to school all day. It’s Test Drive Day at the Christian School, so they’re getting a feel for what 3rd grade and 8th grade will be like next year if they both go there full-time.

Between homeschooling my older one and keeping my younger one home half-days, I haven’t experienced what it’s like to be just me, in my home, on Orcas Island.

It couldn’t be better timing. I was just thinking the other day that senioritis happens in your 13th year of school (kindergarten through 12th). Well, I have senioritis, motheritis, homeschoolitis, or whatever you’d like to call it (though I have no inflammation). I’ve been on for 13 1/2 years straight, no summers off, no vacations until a week ago when I visited New Orleans to meet up with my siblings sans families. It was a glorious thing!

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve loved every minute of momming. Well, you know; all the harmonious ones. I’ve been ever-grateful to get to stay at home with them and see all their firsts, seconds, and thousandths. I’ve been feeding guidance, wisdom, experience, and energy into them from birth till now. And now I’m ready to think my own thoughts, live my own time, create new things I haven’t even dreamed up yet.

So here I sit, not quite sure of what this time will mean. Granted, they’ll be back home for our last several days of school and for the whole summer. But things are shifting. I’m actually going on runs with my husband. The older one is working. The younger one is self-sufficient. No one needs me like they used to. What timing, as I am quite liking the feeling of being released!

I admit I’ve felt mixed emotions all day. I’ve felt alone. I’ve felt aimless. But I also look forward to feeling these feelings a little more for the first time in almost a sesquidecade to see what I will do with them.