Alone.

One thing no one ever told me about this whole Stay At Home (Ha) Mom gig is that I would, so many of my days, feel so alone. And I do. I'm surrounded by people, surrounded for sure by kids, I'm married and share a bed and a bathroom with another person. And yet, I still feel very alone most of the time. And very lonely.

I am an extrovert with sporadic introvert episodes. So, I'm outgoing, I often over-share, I tell everything I know... and sometimes I just want to be the heck alone. I am cool with going to the movies alone, cool with traveling alone, cool with driving long distances alone. In college and before I was married, I definitely lived better alone than with a roommate. But I do find this whole motherhood thing isolating, and I even find marriage lonely.

We have small children, and I spend much of my day with my eyes pointed downward: looking for children and crawling babies, looking for objects that crawling babies might put into their mouths, looking for lost coins and buttons and keys and dropped food. I feel like I live in a funhouse, where some things are larger in my sight than they actually are, and some things are twisted so that I barely see them at all. And my house is my office, my office I never leave. I still remember the whoosh of relief when I would leave the office back in the years when I worked -- the feeling of my shoulders releasing tension, my feet slipping out of shoes, my head clearing. I don't get that feeling anymore. When the children go to bed, my second shift starts; I start thinking about tomorrow and its demands, the bigger picture of my days and weeks and months ahead, the unfinished laundry and the sink full of dirty dishes.

I used to work in bustling offices full of people, in and out, delivering and picking up, asking questions and bringing answers. Always I had people. And I lived in large cities full of people I knew. I still, when I go back to them, run into people I know on the sidewalks in both New York and L.A. I was In the World.

But here in the suburbs, I spend an awful lot of time in my house and in my car. And beneath the din of my children, I don't hear any voices that are speaking to me, Mama, the person and adult. Probably a good thing I am *not* hearing voices at this point, but regardless, I feel alone as I go about my day, doing the same chores I did yesterday. A stay-at-home mom's work is forever done and undone, over and over again, with no end in sight -- dishes that are cleaned will be soiled again, laundry worn and placed again in the hamper, toy bins overturned several times in a day, and the worst -- the children keep asking to be fed even though I JUST FED THEM ONLY A FEW HOURS AGO. Sheesh, people. Cut me some slack.

So I call my friends, and we try to talk, but the conversations are interrupted only about 800 times by bickering kids, crying babies, and whining. Lots of whining. It is a rare thing to finish a sentence, let alone a thought. I often get off a long phone conversation feeling like I didn't really say anything or hear anything either.

Husband comes home from work, hungry and tired, still grumpy from whatever lovely interactions he had that day, without much leftover in his wells for his kids and his wife. Until the kids go to bed, we can't really talk; after they go to bed, we're so desperate for quiet and so exhausted, we don't want to talk. It all seems so hard. Talking is at the top of a big hill, and our legs are weary from a day of climbing hills.

And so I go to bed, alone, alone thinking about what I have to do, accomplish, and think about tomorrow. How tomorrow I hope I can keep my patience a little bit better with Firstborn, and spend a little more time one on one with my middle child, and cuddle my baby just a little bit more. How I hope I can catch up with the laundry, or get to all our appointments on time, or structure our day better so that the kids aren't bored and begging for the Wii all day and sapping my will to live a little at a time. How tomorrow maybe I can cross the bridge from surviving my day to enjoying it. That would be a good goal.

And I wonder if everyone out there is lonely too?