I wake up missing my kids.
Co-parenting and joint custody with a shifting and never set schedule that sometimes works out to two days on and two off has been much harder than I anticipated. I never go more than a few days without seeing them but on the mornings I don’t get them ready for school and make eggs and sometimes turn on My Little Pony and help put on a princess dress or pull out art supplies are hard.
At night I fall asleep listening for them, convincing myself they must be there, resisting the urge to go downstairs and check. I even miss the fights over getting teeth brushed and the request to delay bedtime a little longer. It’s hard to resist reading just one more bedtime story.
Right now my daughter throws herself into my arms, kissing me, not a shy bone in her body as she tells me how much she loves me. My son is a little more reserved, he’s getting older and working on being as cool as his eleven year old cousin, and mostly tells me he loves me after I’ve said it first. But there are still lots of Saturday mornings tucked under blankets on the sofa, eating cereal and watching cartoons, when he says, “Mommy will you hold me?”
Yes baby, always.
I felt very alone in being a parent at first. Overwhelmed. Adrift. So much so that I struggled to find the woman I’d been before. I thought if I could find her, I could follow her back to the point where she’d…