It’s not very often that I come across the chance to get away from my life as a mother and wife. On a daily basis, the majority of my time is spent focusing on making sure the kids are watered and fed, the house doesn’t get swallowed up and digested by laundry and dirty dishes, and that my part-time employers don’t get Pink Slip happy and cut me loose.
So when my blogger buddy Keesha from Mom’s New Stage hinted at meeting up at BloggyCon this weekend, I jumped at the chance to skip out of town and leave the kids with Jon. I literally skipped…to the car, in the hotel lobby, around my childless hotel room. Heck, Jon travels all the time for work, it’s payback time, right?
Photo courtesy Lasse Christensen. Some rights reserved.
But, like every other time I’ve left home (which hadn’t been in over a year), after the giddy euphoria of being kid-free dissipates, I’m left with a rancid taste of guilt in my mouth. Seriously? I can’t get 48 hours alone without this Mommy Guilt pissing all over my party? When I’m at home with my kids, I find myself fighting the urge to speed out to the airport and stow away on a flight to Tahiti. So why does leaving them for longer stretches give me temporary amnesia? Why am I spending my few hours away from them even thinking about them? I’m supposed to be enjoying myself, dammit! Not pining for those little terrors that made me want to get away in the first place.
First, that Get Away Guilt (a.k.a. GAG) comes the millisecond I spot Other Kids. The ones that slightly resemble my offspring and remind me I’ve ditched my own at home. Date night with my husband? We get seated next to the family with kids our childrens’ ages. On a flight without kids for the first time in half a decade? I get seated next to the adorable little girl with springy pigtails and Oreo crumbs littering her face who has suckered me into engaged me in a rip-roaring round of peek-a-boo, making me regret having yelled at my daughter mere hours before for smearing her booger on the back of my shirt. Driving in the car alone, without having to expedite snacks and loveys to the backseat? That’s a good time for the radio to air one of my kids’ favorite songs. And there I am, smiling in slow motion, thinking about how sweet and cute and loving and well behaved my kids are. Delusional, yes. Temporarily insane? Most definitely. GAG.
What IS that? Am I the only one that experiences this GAG? What is that cliche, about distance making the heart grow fonder?
Because I know that an hour after I return home, after the rib-crushing hugs have been issued, after I have drowned in the glorious little kid perfume of peanut butter sandwich/mud-pie/crayon and after the excitement of having me back home as floated away, the bickering will resurface, socks will be left out on every surface of the living room, and life will assume its normalcy.
By the way, I just checked. It is only a quick 19-hour flight to get away to Bora Bora…
