Me, Myself and I?

Tonight as I sit here all alone (the girls are all still on vacation with their other parents, Keith is playing a show and I didn’t feel up to the loud punk rock tonight), I find myself pondering singleness.  I am enjoying the silence, the stillness.  It’s a different quiet than during the day. During the day there are dishes to be washed and bathrooms to be cleaned.  This is time to be savored.

Tonight, I found this fascinating blog.  This chick just keeps a little diary going of her life.  She’s sarcastic and witty.  She has cats who are like my Dutch Boy kitty.  She started off “blogging” in 2003 – she was writing emails to her four best friends and posting them on a website for them to read.  She is what I think I would have grown up to me once upon a time.

She is also single.

I sat there reading and my mind wandered into a world where I was single.  I don’t cook if I don’t want to.  When I do want to, I cook whatever I am in the mood for, nothing is planned around whether we have kids or not or whether or not the meal has weird texture-y food items in it.  If I don’t want to wash the dishes, they can wait till “tomorrow”. By “tomorrow”, I really mean four days from now.  No one is going to complain and it’s not like I am going to dirty up that many dishes anyway.  I have this fantasy of me knitting in front of the TV while I watch some sappy romance movie.  No one would bother me or laugh at me as I cried and blew my nose loudly.

Then I realized, I love to cook.  I like cooking every day.  I especially like to cook special foods for the kids.  And I like seeing if I can creatively come up with stuff that doesn’t have ingredients that some people won’t eat.  For instance, we can’t have tomatoes. (Except on the rare occasion, they can be picked out. Thanks, honey!) We can’t have mushrooms or ricotta cheese.  You get the idea.  The dishes… well I hate the dishes, that’s no secret.  But I do like the clean sink, so I will do the dishes.  And I would be totally mortified if you stopped by and saw four days worth of dishes in my sink.  As for the knitting: I don’t know how to knit.  I could learn.  And if I did, then I could knit during the day when no one was home and watch sappy romance movies all day and no one would laugh at me.

So when I stop to examine the situation, I realize I wouldn’t trade my family life for being single for anything.  I love my family.

Good night, Keith, Abby, Katie and Emily wherever you all are.  I love you.  See you when you get home.  Sleep tight.
Don’t let the bed bugs bite.