Beloved children,
I am in Chicago, and you are in Raymond, Washington. Google tells me it’d take 32 hours to drive the 2,144 miles to get to you. It’s the farthest I’ve ever been from you, and for the longest amount of time.
Mom has a work retreat here, and we tacked on a visit with your great-grandmother outside Milwaukee. That, plus a short visit with some old Chicago friends, means that Mom and I are spending a whole week away from you two. Sometime in the future, that may not sound so significant, but with our current lifestyle, when I am with you all day every day, a week apart feels like an Apollo mission.
Before Mom and I left, I worried about the trip every night for weeks. I’m not the type to fixate on apocalyptic possibilities; that’s more Mom’s style, imagining nightmare scenarios like our plane crashing or you breaking an arm or something. My anxieties were more modest. What kind of routine would you fall into? Would you be angry with us? Would you feel abandoned? Would you wake up at night crying and homesick?
So far (five days into our seven-day trip, as I write this), none of those worries appear to be materializing—at least not from what Grandma and Grandpa report. That’s one strange thing: I don’t really know what you’re up to. There’s FaceTime, and there’s Marco Polo, and there’s texts, but what’s really going on exists in a black box. I lack the usual indicators. There is no background chatter between brother and sister as I wash the dishes, no requests for games, no demands for food, no children’s songs on Alexa, no makeshift percussion instruments created from things not meant to be hit. It’s odd not to hear you constantly.
The one question that remains to be answered, of course, is how you will adjust when we return. When Mom and I celebrated our wedding anniversary this August, you spent three nights at Grandma and Grandpa’s, and our reunion with you was a rough landing. You truly love visiting your grandparents, and they take wonderful, over-the-top, doting care of you, but still—a rough landing.
Sister, the happy-go-lucky two-year-old you are, you had an okay time of it—extra clingy, extra needy, but that’s about it. Brother, you, on the other hand, had some major emotions built up and unexpressed. They didn’t come out of your mouth; they came out with multiple meltdowns a day, with shouting and sullenness, and with a professional-grade, multi-day round of the silent treatment specially reserved for me.
Finally, after a few days, you found some words that fit your feelings. At bedtime one night, you begged us to stay with you because you were scared.
“Do you want us to leave a light on?” we asked.
“No, I’m not scared of the dark,” you replied. “I’m scared of not being with you.”
Ah. There it was. I taught you the phrase “separation anxiety,” and we agreed to have one of us check on you after a few minutes. That helped you relax. We’ve added the nightly check-in to the bedtime routine since then.
When Mom and I return from Chicago, who knows what cocktail of emotions will have fizzed and bubbled inside you, or what measures we’ll need to instate to relieve the pressure. We’ll all survive, though. Kids have been spending time away from their parents for all of human existence, right? Plus, there’s a good chance you won’t even remember the time away when you’re older, and if you do, at least we know you’ve been safe and cared for with family.
These, by the way, are the sorts of things parents repeat to themselves to assuage their guilt.
In the meantime, as strange as this separation is, I’ve gotten to enjoy an extremely rare experience in my day-to-day life: time to myself. Lots of it, too. Mom has three solid days of meetings with her coworkers, so I find myself with hours on my hands, no schedule to follow, no children to care for, no agenda whatsoever.
While this amount of free time is unprecedented for me (at least since I became a father), I have had tastes of it before. It’s like seeing an eclipse, it’s so rare and surreal. The first time I remember it happening was when Mom and I escaped to Portland for a night while you stayed with your grandparents. We were in a Buffalo Exchange, and while Mom tried on clothes in the fitting room, I stood next to a rack and compared two pairs of shoes for a good ten minutes uninterrupted, not sure I’d buy anything but taking my sweet time looking at each one.
It’s silly to say, but that moment felt incredibly luxurious. It was almost prodigal, like I had finished a meal and could just throw away the plate. How decadent it was to have time to myself, unpressured and responsibility-free. At one point in my life, such moments were cereal; now they are filet mignon.
Call it self-care, call it selfishness—for as much as I love and adore you both, in these moments to myself, I find a delightful aimlessness. At home with you, I’m always aiming, always moving with purpose. I’m washing dishes, or prepping the next meal, or planning an outing, or coaxing you to put on shoes, or filling paint cups with water and brushes, or mediating a conflict, or reading a stack of books, or turning your underwear right-side in, or reminding you again to say “please,” or any of the thousand things that make up our life together.
So, on a vacation like this, I wander. I roam. I dilly dally. In my normal routine, such verbs feel impossible.
Today I jogged to the Chicago Public Library. I was like a chocolate connoisseur, taking pretentiously longer than needed to savor the delicacy. I browsed heartily, reading not just the back-cover synopses but indulging in whole pages of reviews. I came across a newspaper, read a music review beginning to end. I found the sports section and consumed an entire article, turned the page, then flipped back to enjoy a passage again, just because I could.
Normally, my visits to the library with you entail a combination of paring down our haul of books to a manageable weight, escorting you to the bathroom for emergency poops, and making sure you don’t initiate a self-destruct sequence on the catalog computers.
I exaggerate, a little. You’re generally amazing kids, and I generally love going to the library with you. Still, the notion of visiting the fiction section, let alone stopping to read whole passages—whole passages!—would never cross my mind.
So here I am in Chicago, hardly saving the world, but not feeling like I need to, either. When I get back home, there’ll be stories to tell and feelings to unpack and routines to rebuild. There’ll be photos to see and fears to allay and cuddles to share. There will be the ordinary yet precious jewel that is our life together, insular yet invaluable, like a world contained within a marble. It’s healthy for me to get outside it from time to time, to dawdle elsewhere. But to our life together I’ll soon return, and there I’ll happily linger.
P.S. I’m posting this a couple weeks after Mom and I came home, and you both did great with the transition back—no silent treatment, no massive meltdowns. Granted, we prepared better this time. We talked a lot about the trip beforehand, made sure you had a clear idea of what was happening. More importantly, perhaps, we got you a bunch of gifts. If you can’t have mommy and daddy, may as well have Dollar Tree presents from mommy and daddy. We sent you with one gift bag per day we were gone, partly to remind you of us and partly to help Grandma and Grandpa keep you entertained. Do I, the historically stingy, anti-consumerism person I am, feel good about fighting separation anxiety with material things? Actually, yeah. I feel fine about it; it worked beautifully. In the videos of you opening each package, you looked ecstatic.
And hey, maybe the gifts had little to do with the good transition. Maybe you’re just growing up, discovering flexibility that you didn’t know you had, or that I didn’t know you had. Maybe—gasp—you need me less than I think you do.
Nah. Let’s say it was the gifts.
P.P.S. Obviously, Mom and I couldn’t have left you in Washington for this kind of a trip without big-time help from loved ones. Some good friends of ours were kind enough to watch you at our house for the weekend before Grandma and Grandpa had you at their house for five nights—“Camp Raymond,” we called it. It was a huge undertaking, but they were so happy to have you. In case you missed it, your grandparents love you very, very much.
If you have kids one day, we’ll owe you some big babysitting favors.