Sunday evening.
I have just dropped Ads to the airport as he heads back to college after a few days at home. Y has taken herself off to a garba event. S is in Chicago with his friends. The house is eerily silent as I sit on the couch, sending off some work emails and planning for the week ahead while half-watching a show on Netflix.
I am relishing every moment of this solitude. Dinner was a simple salad. No one to cook for feels like a luxury. Then it comes to me. How this pattern is going to repeat itself ad nauseam over the next few years (decades?). Me alone, or me and S doing our own thing, with our kids dispersed, who knows where.
For those long years in the parenting trenches, I craved for evenings like this. No responsibility, no plans, nobody to take care of. Now I seem to have climbed out of that muddy trench, and I am looking around at the vistas of possibility opening up around me. Yet, I know that one day in the near future, I may very much miss my messy trench and the life I lived there!
It has been established that women's brains soften or edit the pain of childbirth, an evolutionary strategy designed to promote future reproduction. I dare say the same happens with parenting as well!
