An Autumnal Hiatus

Last week and this week present something strange to me. A visitation of days past, where my hours in the morning and afternoon are strangely silent, where I have lunches with people not seen in months or years as a single person. No longer are there small, cute, intense people attached to me as I attempt to have a conversation with another grown-up. No, I have not died, nor gone completely delusional. My daughters are in kindergarten from 9 a.m. until 3:50 p.m. and I am in-between jobs.

My last day of work at my previous position was October 10 and here it is, October 22. My new job starts a week from today, October 29. I think this is the largest stretch of time I’ve had to myself since I was in my 20s, working three or four days a week at a florist, with the rest of all eternity to do whatever the hell I wanted to do with my time and what little money I had.

Certainly as a mother, this twelve day stretch of quiet, broken up by the two day weekends intermixed, is unprecedented. I can’t say it isn’t good, because it is. There is a part of me that feels profoundly sad that this freedom will end in a week, and I’ll go back to being just a little bit overextended in pretty much every way possible. No, actually, that makes me really sad. And I am definitely mourning this precious time off before it is even over, similar to the way I mourn the end of the crepe papier pink trees at the climax of spring before the buds actually explode. Because I know this idea of perfection is only an idea. That my creative energies are not quite where I’d like them to be with this much unstructured time alone.

Why is the only time a person can have this kind of time is when they are between jobs? Am I wrong about this?

I still managed to get into the studio this morning for an hour and a half before the outside world started calling me with responsibility requests. I should have left the phone downstairs. I will leave it downstairs tomorrow morning. When I attempt to find out where I left the small amount of creativity I used to think I had.

Poop.