Damn That Cat

It happens once a month--irritability, sleeplessness, teariness, sniffles. I wish I could blame it on hormones. But no. It's irregular, for one thing (early one month, late the next); for another, my hormones are largely artificial right now thanks to a handy prescription. It's not hormones.

I remember back in the summer, thinking about these occasions, believing that they would be a boon to my personal productivity. All of the things I would be able to accomplish! All of the sleeping in I could do! Instead, I spend them largely fighting off the cat.

These are Frances's long weekends with Daddy. Normally she visits with him from Thursday to Saturday, but once a month on a weekend that is determined jointly, she goes from Thursday to Sunday. I have the whole weekend to myself. It's not as much fun as it sounds.

Now: All of the things that made this a good idea back in the summer are still true, the most important one being how much Frances misses her Daddy. She needs these extra-long weekends with him. You should see how excited she gets, Dear Readers: how she begins to jump up and down as soon as I remind her, when I pick her up from daycare. How, on the way out of the school, she tells everyone she passes: "I'm going to see my Daddy!" A statement that for most children would not be such cause for joy. How she runs at the door when he rings the bell, leaps into his arms. How she asks me plaintively on every other morning if her Daddy is going to pick her up today.

And I knew this was going to be hard. In fact, the prospect of not seeing her for a few days every week was one of the reasons I stayed as long as I did. I knew this would be hard. I did not know how hard it was going to be, partially because of other unrelated decisions I've made since then. Mostly because I'm a sap, and I hate to be apart from my little girl. Hell, I took Frances with us when Erik and I went to Vegas a few years back because I could not stand the thought of leaving her behind even for a few days, and I routinely turn down business trips and have since the beginning because comfy quiet hotel bed be damned--I miss my girl too much.

The first few months, I looked forward to the extra time and was struck in the face with a concrete bat when the much-longed-for sleeping opportunity arrived, only to be spent battling the cat, instead. So many things I could do with that time if only I could shake off the funk and do them. It's sitting in that empty apartment by myself for two days that does me in. Frances's toys too quiet and tidy in the corner, her bed too neat and empty upstairs, no insistent demands for apple juice or hopeful, "But I want a friend to play with me. Won't you be my friend and play with me?"s. What I need to do, of course, is get out of the house--but that's been difficult these past few months and being an introvert it wasn't easy to begin with. So instead, I end up sitting in a too-quiet, too-tidy apartment with too much time on my hands to wonder how exactly it is that I ended up there. And how it is that I've ended up making decisions this past year far too much like the ones that got me here to begin with; and how Frances and I paid such a high price to get out of that situation, yet given the chance I find myself sliding so easily toward its flip side; and wondering how long it's going to take for me to learn this simple god-damned lesson, and how someone supposedly so smart can be so completely fucking stupid.

It's not good enough. I have to do better.

Posted by Andrea at January 17, 2008 11:21 AM under Me , Single Momming

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