As I sat down for lunch the other day, staring down a very adult-like spinach salad and not the usual PB&J, it occurred to me: it’s quiet. The TV was off, and there weren’t the usual sounds of singing, screaming, laughing kids that fill my home. I was at the kitchen table, all alone. There weren’t the usual suspects there at the table with me, fighting over how many more bites of the PB&J to eat, spilling their milk on the just-washed floors, and begging to watch another show on The Disney Channel while we ate our meal. There were no jokes, no fighting, no discussion of what to do that day. Should we bike to the park? Run errands? Play?

Instead, it was quiet.

The kids have returned to school for the year, and for the first time in forever, I have the house to myself. This is the year that my youngest kiddo goes to 1st grade, which for us equals a full day of school. From 9:05am to 3:40pm the house is quiet.

Too quiet.

Stopping to smell the roses
Stopping to smell the roses
Little piggies
Little piggies
I started dreading this day when my kids were about three years old, that day when they would leave the house all day and wouldn’t need a stay-at-home mom anymore. I thought about the day, preparing to meet it with equal parts joy and uncertainty and fear. When I made the decision to stay home with my children, I left behind my teaching career, letting my certification expire while I bathed kids and changed diapers, and watched nine years of graduating college seniors fill the available teaching positions around Chicagoland.

A time came when my friends and I started to ask one another, “What are you going to do when your kids go to school?” the grown up version of the age-old question: What do you want to be when you grow up? Except that at thirty-six or thirty-eight or forty, it can be terrifying question. We’re not as young as we used to be; nearly everything we learned in college and graduate school has now been replaced with the lines from our children’s favorite picture books – or better yet, Sponge Bob. I know more about superheroes and Disney princesses than I do those historical figures I read about and lectured on for years. President who???

Waiting for a tea party
Waiting for a tea party
Games of hide ‘n seek
Games of hide ‘n seek
Now the kids are in school and it is quiet. They day goes by without whining, without fighting, without toys strewn upon the floor. I eat lunch in silence, and never have to remind those around me to stop messing around and eat. As grateful as I thought I would be to enjoy a meal without the whining and the spilling and the sound of the TV, I find that I miss these things. I miss the slow, lazy mornings of summer, the afternoon games of hide ‘n seek. I miss tea parties with stuffed animals and hours of competitive games of Uno and Trouble and charades. My kids are growing up far too fast for me, but forging their own lives at the very same time; they’re turning into little people with hopes and dreams and aspirations – and that is a wonderful thing. It’s what we call bittersweet.

I made a mental list of things I wanted to accomplish when the kids returned to school. It’s pretty simple, really: write more, read more, watch the news and run. In the last few weeks I’ve gone on wonderful writing binges, read -or am reading- some really terrific books (see below!), and attempted to run once or twice. Maybe three times.

I haven’t turned on the news. But there’s still time. For now, I’m forcing myself to enjoy the quiet.