My sister’s first child was born in the spring of 1980. She’d been married three years, and for two years had lived in a house that she and her husband invested with a good deal of “sweat equity” -- new kitchen, family room, hand-polished wood floors. Making a nest, it seemed, with the final touch a picture perfect nursery with lemon walls and an antique rocking chair.

When school ended for the summer I went to visit her for a few days. Brian was six weeks old then. As we prepared to go out for a little shopping (I remember that she wanted a sun hat for him that did not look “girly”), I said to her, “Have you been alone in the house since he was born?”

Rosie looked at me strangely, as if she didn’t know what it was I was asking. “You mean without the baby? Well,” she said after considering a moment, “I don’t know.”

Truth to tell now, as I look back, I’m not sure I knew what it was I was asking. The
question was born of applying the observation of my sister’s new role as a mother to my own ideas about what is important in life and doubts about my ability to change and adapt. 

I was at the time one divorce, one remarriage, and five years away from becoming a mother myself. My child-free status then was more a matter of default than of decision. I had a habit of going through life re-actively rather than pro-actively, or “letting things fall on you,” as a friend put it. I’d recently read a book called something like A Baby? Maybe after seeing its author on Phil Donahue. It laid out all the pros and cons of parenthood, and suggested that a woman contemplating this life-changing step take a long hard look at her needs for solitude and privacy and her ability to keep going through illness, fatigue, rain, snow, and gloom of night.

By the time Lynn was born in 1985 I was nearly 39 and had lived either alone or with one other adult for two decades. I had been able to indulge my natural inclination for early morning solitude and silence while reading or writing. Since I worked at a job which required constant extroversion, I had developed the pattern of bookending those demanding hours with long periods where I answered to no one for anything.

Adding Lynn to my life proved to have only positive effects. She was an easy baby, and I was blessed also with a remarkably adaptable spouse whose active role in parenting must not be minimized. Our affluence, too played a role -- the ability to have our separate spaces in the house, to buy time away and drudgery relief are things not everyone can have. I began rising even earlier than necessary (something I perceived as a great sacrifice) in order to secure that special silence, and Lynn, after she was able to rouse and dress herself, learned to peer into my mug and ask quietly, “Is that your second cup?”

Ironically, it is these days, when Lynn needs little from me beyond maternal wisdom and my ability to drive and Ron and I keep retired persons’ hours that I feel distracted sometimes by the energy that fills this house. Lynn is up at 5:45 showering and blow-drying for an hour. The air crackles with her spirit and the joy she takes in life. By the time she leaves at 7:00 Ron’s computer is on, and will remain so all day, along with periodic stretches of the television’s History Channel or Shostakovich on the stereo. There is always somebody, besides me, BREATHING in the house.

And so today it was a bit of an unexpected joy to find that I could experience two ways of being “Home Alone.” Ron left before 8:00 for his monthly breakfast with former colleagues and then a full day of attending to his mother’s business and personal affairs. I quickly postponed my plans to get my car’s oil changed and go to the library. 

I turned off all the computers and other energy emitting devices and sat for a solid hour in silence. I looked out across the backyard vista still picturesque from last week’s brief snowfall. I watched the crows hugely dark against the white swale dip and dart in their foraging, and the cardinals shaking the forsythia branches clear of their chilly wraps. 

I wrote in my journal for a while, and then composed yesterday’s “Outlaw Maggy” piece in longhand. I went upstairs to my silent study, and before I turned on the computer to code and upload the essay I did some foraging of my own, rooting through some long undisturbed boxes for the cross-stitch tools and supplies I’ll need for part of my Katherine Project.

The light in the kitchen is most glorious during this season at about 1:00. I sat there for two hours working on the poem drafts I’d created in Cape May. By the time Lynn and Ron came back about 3:00 I was ready for company.

Monday nights afford me a different kind of “home alone” experience. Ron goes out to his choral group practice and I have Lynn to myself. After supper she does her homework, and then at 8:00 we sit together on the couch for the latest episode of  Seventh Heaven. I find this program cloying in its sentimentality, ridiculous in its stereotypes, and straining of credulity in some of its plot lines, but Lynn, as sophisticated as she is, loves it. At least it’s not some tattooed band of surly outcasts wailing “Hurt Me, Hurt Me All Night Long.” And who knows how far into the future she’ll want to curl up on the couch and watch anything with her mother. (We tape the wonderful and much more realistic Freaks and Geeks, now on opposite Seventh Heaven, for later viewing.)

I am NOT complaining that my “home alone” time is all too sporadic these days. My devoting an entire essay to the idea is an indication, I think, of the fact that we always want what we don’t have. I know there will be people reading this who will be put off by what might come across as the whining of a very advantaged woman, and there might even be a drop-off in readership. Please know that I count my blessings every day and am fully mindful of my nearly unlimited ability to make choices.

Before Lynn was born some people seemed to relish reminding me that my life would never be the same. “You’ll have to put away all those porcelain knickknacks.” “You’ll never cross-stitch another pillow.” “You’ll never know silence again.”

“Yes I will,” I told them. “When they’re both gone.” That day will come all too soon.