I’m an introvert. A seriously introverted introvert. I’ve seen quizzes and personality tests where people discover that they are extroverted introverts or outgoing introverts or slightly introverted extroverts, to name a few. I’m none of those. I’m a plain old introvert. I am also the stay-at-home mom of a 1 year old and a 3 year old. It’s December 31st which means I survived the holiday madness and on top of the typical Christmas craziness, our family suffered through 3 full weeks of the flu, complete with sinus infections, bronchial infections, and an ear infection resulting in a ruptured ear drum. As if that wasn’t enough, our little dog’s heart medicine stopped working and he crossed the rainbow bridge two days after Christmas. My heart is truly broken by his passing.
Yesterday, I reached my mental, emotional, and physical breaking point. I was irritable and bitchy and my nerves were completely frayed and exposed. My girls love to cuddle with me and sit in my lap and they give the greatest hugs. But every time someone touched me, I wanted to crawl out of my skin and escape. I was on an emotional overload that was sinking my soul quickly. My husband asked “What do you need? What can I do?” At that moment, I couldn’t give an answer. I simply wanted to run away. As I struggled to get through the rest of the day and tried (but did not succeed) to not yell at everyone and take out my anger and grief and frustration on people who did nothing but love me, I kept thinking of my husband saying “What do you need?”
Here’s what I need: I need to be alone. I have not recharged my batteries in years. Literally, years. I don’t need a trip to the hair salon. I don’t need to go to the spa. I don’t need to wander the aisles of Target unaccompanied. I don’t need to have lunch with other moms. I don’t need a girls night out. I love my husband and desperately need a date night with him, but that’s not what I want right now either. I want to be alone.
I want to wake up in the morning when I want to wake up. I don’t want to be thrown into the thralls of getting food and filling milk cups and changing diapers and wiping tushies and breaking up fights. I want to get up, make a pot of coffee and actually drink a giant mug of HOT coffee in peace and quiet.
I want to go for a run….alone…without pushing a stroller filled with 70 pounds of toddler. If my two dogs were younger and still able to run I’d take them with me. I want to pretend it is years ago when I trained for marathons and half-marathons and my two buddies would trot along beside me. I want to get lost in my music and daydream about being as fit now as I was when running a mile was a warm up, not an exhausting workout.
If I can’t go for a run, because honestly, in this daydream it’s a beautiful sunny morning, but in reality it would probably be cold and rainy, I want to put a workout DVD in the player and get my sweat on, without little beings jumping on my back or crawling between my legs or dropping 5 pound weights on my toes. I want to follow up that workout with a short yoga video to find my zen, because God knows my zen has been missing for months now.
I want to make my lunch, uninterrupted by little voices screaming for this and yelling for that. And then, I know it sounds impossible, I want to sit at the table and enjoy my lunch while it’s still warm, with no children climbing in my lap or asking to be cleaned up or screaming for more of something that I have no more of or spilling her entire plate of food on the floor.
I want to take a long hot shower and treat my stressed out tresses to a rejuvenating hair mask and my skin to a detoxing exfoliating scrub. I want to take time to actually shave my entire leg, both of them, not just quickly hit my shins and hope I get those few hairs that I’ve obviously missed for the last month. I want to follow this hot shower with a long relaxing soak in a bubble bath in my jetted tub that never, ever gets used. I want to soak with epsom salts and bath bombs and bubbles while drinking a giant class of wine and reading a book. A book without pictures. A book that was actually written for people over the age of 8.
I want to order Thai food for dinner and eat it straight out of the little white carton while lounging on my couch and watching whatever the hell I feel like on TV. There will be no PBS Kids or animated movies. I want to binge on murder porn until I can’t stand to solve another cold case homicide. I want to enjoy grown-up humor on sit-coms that I didn’t even know existed because all I ever watch is children’s shows. Maybe I’ll dig out the old 80’s classic movies or discover a new action flick. Something rated higher than G or PG due to language or violence or adult content.
I want to spend a day alone. I need to spend a day alone. But here’s the catch. I’m a mom and a wife and the reality is, after a mere 30 minutes alone in the bathroom putting my jetted tub to good use, I start to miss the madness. I start to wonder what my kids are doing. I start to wonder if my husband and daughters are having fun without me. And yes, I start to feel guilty for putting myself first. So….could I really handle twelve full hours of being alone? I don’t know but it’s been a ton of fun daydreaming about it. Maybe, if I’m lucky and the stars and the sun and the moon all align and God smiles down on me, I’ll get to pee by myself at some point today. That would be nice.