Solo Bolo
Last weekend, Logan returned from the first vacation he’s ever taken without me, a full five-day trip to Chicago with his gaming friends. (The game, to be honest, completely mystifies me. Most of what I know about it is through complaints—the models are too expensive, they’re too hard to paint, they’re too flimsy to travel with, other players don’t know the rules, or worse, pretend not to know, and, the biggest one, although it’s not a complaint, just something I’ve picked up from being married to someone who plays, is that the games last two hours. And are sometimes called for time.)
The small, resentful voice inside me wanted to know why he was leaving me with two children, making me a single mom for a week, even though his mom was going to take Bear and my mom was going to travel down to take care of Clementine while I went to work, because guess who currently has negative vacation time thanks to having to take five days before each maternity leave kicked in. (Not to mention the various pediatrician appointments I needed time off for, the flu that hit all of us so hard this winter, the occasional migraine that makes me unable to see well enough to drive myself to the office…) So, no fucking si did I have vacation time.
But also, small resentful voice aside, I desperately wanted Logan to get out and enjoy himself. He needed, needs, a break from being trapped under two small children, cooking daily meals for four people, talking to few other adults other than me on GChat—I will never call it Hangouts—during the day. I am the one who “works,” but if you were to check in on both of us on any given afternoon, only one of us has a high probability of having just spent the last five minutes idly surfing the web while polishing off a piece of birthday cake. So he was going to go have a fun gaming week, and I was going to farm out one child to each grandmother and go to work. It was going to be fine.
Except then Logan’s mother said that my mother should also have the opportunity to spend time with Bear, not just Clementine, so she would just see him after Logan got back, and I was put in the absolutely awful position of either leaving my mother alone with two children OR telling my boss at the last minute that my childcare fell through.
When we brought Bear home from the hospital, I was terrified. I was so drugged in the hospital that Logan did all of the diaper changes and most of the feedings, and then suddenly we were home with a newborn and I, his m o t h e r, had no idea how to do anything. We started parenthood in shifts, for reasons that are now unknowable to me. I watched Bear during the day, Logan watched him at night—literally never do this—and the first time Logan went to go lay down, I was flooded with a feeling I hadn’t had since childhood sleepovers: the intense sense of dread that comes when everyone starts drifting off to sleep, one by one, until eventually you’re the only left awake.
It’s been two years and there are times that I still don’t feel fully recovered from those long nights of Bear’s infanthood. At about eight o’clock he would start crying and keep at it for eight or nine hours straight. That fact is disconnected from any memory of the reality of it, but I do remember Googling safe-haven laws on my phone. I remember Logan and I joking that he would have a very happy life at whatever firehouse we left him at. They would raise him as their own. He’d have a dog, ride the truck, sirens ablaze, slide down the pole when it was time to eat communal dinners. How else do they get new firefighters, anyway?
If it’s a particularly stressful day now and one or both kids start crying, a small part of me collapses in on itself. I do not have the tools to fix this I think, even though Clementine slept straight through her first night home and most nights after that, even though Bear has mellowed considerably and I now know all of the things to make him feel better. (In order: Daniel Tiger, food, Baby Shark, blowing raspberries on his stomach, leaving him alone until he forgets why he was upset to begin with.)
In the end, I worked it out with my boss. My mom got to spend quality time with both of the kids, and when she had to leave early and I was faced with two solo days with them, I didn’t panic. Somehow when it’s just me, up against it, I surprise myself by not panicking.
Once I was in a taxi in Costa Rica and the name of my hotel was no longer a magic word that transported me to the front door but a source of confusion. At home I get lost if we make one wrong turn on the way to the grocery store, but solo-international-traveller me took over and started directing the taxi driver. “Derecha,” I said to him, then to myself, “How do you know that? You took French in high school.” The inner voice that had shored me up didn’t know, and she didn’t know how to say right in Spanish either, but the hotel was in fact to the left, and we arrived and slipped a crisp twenty into his hands.
So I took the kids to the zoo. I let Bear out of the double stroller and he ran around while I pushed his sister behind him. At one point he dashed into a no-stroller-allowed building, because of course he did, and I ripped Clementine out of her seat and chased him inside. The next day I took them to the Children’s Museum and chased him some more while holding his poor sister, who just wanted to crawl and put her mouth on everything she could reach. At one point he dashed outside—he swindled me, he knows the place much better than I do—straight into the unseasonable water zone and I followed with the stroller, letting him get wetter than I should have given the chilly day, making several circles around the place until he got tired and I buckled him in and drove them both home, not making any wrong turns on the way.