home alone, single mom edition.
The first night, I dialed my ex, who didn’t pick up but did decide to text: Hey… Saw you called. I’m not in a position to talk. Is everything okay? which was an appropriate question since I never dial my ex anymore.
Hey. Yep. Everything’s okay. Thanks for checking, I typed back.
He didn’t entirely buy it, I suppose, since he texted again in the morning to see “what was up last night.” I assured him that it really was nothing.
Except that I’d dropped my daughter off in Richmond during the day.
“Just wanted to talk,” I tacked onto the explanation, hoping it read as casual, knowing it came off as the opposite.
He called in response, because exes who truly understood you seldom lose the ability.
We used to make the run to Richmond together, during my first year in Durham, when I was still figuring out far too many things, our fledgling relationship and how to satisfy the obligations of long-distance co-parenting (during a pre-vaccine global pandemic) chief among them.
He’d drive me and Story the two and a half hours up I-85 in his Chrysler 300 and, in the front seat, while I luxuriated both in the leather interior and in a delicious, stress-lightened gratitude that I didn’t have to make the drive alone, we’d trade conspiratorial whispers about how odd it was, this entire practice of passing off a child to their other parent in a mutually-agreed upon parking lot.
I’d never had to do that in Baltimore. When my daughter’s dad wanted to see her there, he would just pick her up at my grandmother’s apartment, which was awkward in its own way but required minimal exertion on my part.
I left minimal exertion behind when chose to leave Maryland. Moving five hours south meant cultivating new practices around co-parenting and embracing whatever early tensions they pulled taut.
On those rides to Virginia with my ex, Story sat behind me in his backseat so I couldn’t see her face, couldn’t gauge her expressions or try to predict how she might be feeling. Was she relieved to be leaving us? Was she feeling as uncomfortable with the idea of her mother’s boyfriend interacting with her dad as I was? Did she like the more permanent two-parent arrangement she had at his home better than the fumbling-toward-an-uncertain-future one that we’d sprung on her at ours?
My ex used to absorb those questions on the drive back home. He knew how closely I carried them, knew I missed my daughter before she even exited the car, had been missing her even before we left home. He knew that part of his role with me then was to distract me from her absence and to do so thoroughly enough that I wouldn’t keep concocting more questions.
That is not his role with me now. It hasn’t been for over two years. But texting him about Richmond must’ve temporarily resuscitated our emotional shorthand. He knows well how hard those first nights without my daughter can be. And he knows that, if I’m not intentional about the three breaks from hands-on parenting I get in a year, I’m prone to spending the entire time alone in my apartment, passing her empty bedroom multiple times a day and breaking new records for how long I can go without hearing the sound of anyone’s voice, including my own. He always found it a little tragic, how much silence I could withstand.
So he talked to me on the phone for over an hour the morning after last Thursday’s drop-off. We caught up on how our lives have been in the long time since we last spoke. He has another girlfriend now; he has for a while. It’s one of the reasons we rarely talk. I have boundaries around this that he doesn’t share. “I’m friends with most of my exes,” he’ll often shrug. “I don’t see the issue.”
The issue has always been clear to me. But it was clearer still after I spent 30 minutes confiding in him about how my daughter’s been doing, about our trips to Michigan and Virginia Beach, about my relationships with various relatives he met while we were together. It became crystalline in the second half of the call, when he began to tell me about his new relationship and asked me about any future plans I may have to pursue one.
“It’s still not a priority for me,” I admitted.
“It doesn’t need to be a priority but… you should open yourself up more to the possibility.”
He knows I struggle with openness, though I was always fairly open with him.
“I guess it still bothers me that you’re here alone,” he added. “No family and all of two friends. I’m one of those and we don’t even really talk.”
I try to explain why I can’t talk to him more often and I start to tear up. It comes back to me in that moment, how much I cried when we were together. I felt really safe crying with him.
I was teary now because I couldn’t quite articulate how break-ups dismantle that safety. I couldn't tell him it would feel too dishonest to pretend on a more regular basis that we still care as much as we once did when, each day, we wake up and demonstrate that we don’t. I would’ve been loath to admit that, when we talk—and only when we talk—it still hurts that we don’t.
He heard the tears and saved me. “I know you well enough to know what you’re trying to say.”
That’s the issue.
The call had gone on too long and we knew it so we ended it. Silence rushed in again, and I was reminded why I want to talk to men when I’m alone. I was reminded, as I reflected on how easy it is to get to the heart of things with someone who once held yours, why it’s not always my brightest idea.
On the second night, I texted my Situation. It was a risk because I never know if arbitrary correspondence is welcome between us; we tend only to talk for a singular purpose. We tread lightly with one another, too lightly. It’s a cadence we’ve crafted over an 11-year stretch and one it would be far too late to switch up now.
Ours is not a history I can put to words. Suffice it to say: it started one way—a romantic way—and we’ve ended it, a number of times, in others. Just after I moved here, I stopped talking to him for two full years. It was as long a silence as we’ve ever imposed on one another. It should’ve been longer. But we always manage, no matter how secure or messy the knots we tie off, to loosen the ends again.
I do not recommend a Situation. Especially not one with someone who’s single nearly as often as you are, whose emotions you cannot gauge even when they’re clearly spoken, who makes you feel, whenever you have his attention, as though you are afflicted with some 19th century fever. But sometimes a single mother who only finds herself alone a few times a year can only sustain a Situation.
He and I do not often exchange confidences, so texting him was much emptier than texting my ex. I regretted reaching out at all. I should know by now that he rarely reaches back.
I cannot tell him what my ex knew without saying: I do not always know who I am without my daughter.
Then again, the Situation may know this better than most. I only engage him when I am without my daughter.
It’s because of the 13 years. At this point, I’ve spent more of my adult life as a mother than as a woman without a child. And now, whenever my daughter is with her father for more than a weekend, all the systems of my body seem to require a hard reset. Too many synapses reroute at once, delivering signals they haven’t in months:
Hands, you will not stroke hair for weeks. Arms, you will not reach for hugs. Eyes, you do not need to scan for your child’s whereabouts. Ears, you needn’t keen toward potential distress. Mouth, you’ve no need to admonish or instruct or joke. Mind, you can loosen your anxious reins a bit (though let’s be honest: the girl does not have to be present to consume your waking thoughts. You’re still going to rouse at 1am wondering if you’ll have readied her enough for adulthood by the time she reaches it. You’ll still startle, open-eyed, at 3, reminding yourself that adulthood is only 7 years away. You won’t know what to do with yourself, then, either, will you? Not if you don’t strategize now. You can’t very well spend your empty nest years texting exes. At 60, you’ll need more than a Situation…).
I spend far too much of my daughter's time away trying to remember who I was before her. Maybe there was something I wanted then that I can still work on now. I take inventory of the things about myself I rarely have time to consider when I’m busy actively parenting: Age is announcing itself, especially under my eyes and in the threading of its spindly fingers through my hair. And it’s curious, too; it’s constantly wondering: Is this it? Are we done with accomplishment? Shouldn’t we reinvent? As what? And when? Can we do it in the week we have left to ourselves, before then another year’s attention back to the growing girl?
Age rarely whispers: You are also a growing girl.
That’s a thing I have to tell myself. When I have time. When I remember.
After the first two nights, I knew better than to talk to men. I spent the rest of the first week, coming to terms with the fact that I’ll need to make more local friends. I’ll need to connect with my community in ways I’ve resisted since we’ve moved here. I’ll need to find work in a market where the need for what I do seems to be diminishing daily.
I’ve made more than one trip to Target. Unpacked boxes. Experimented with my natural curls. Fallen asleep with a pot on the stove. Scrubbed said scorched pot. Read. Binge-watched seasons and series. Saw Barbie solo. Taken and placed occasional phone calls to relatives. Sang, danced, selfied.
There is one week left. It’s my hope that by its end, I’ll be better acquainted with my 43-year-old self. This is the last stretch of time I’ll spend alone with her. By the time my child’s away for a week or more again, it will be winter and I’ll be 44.
We think that who we are as mothers is best defined by how we are with our kids. But it’s the weeks like these that hold up the clearest mirror. That’s why it’s so tempting to spend them texting exes. Or looking for other shiny objects to deflect the stark truths of our own reflection.
I am facing mine now. She has my full attention.