I am super lucky. But some days this is HARD. When I pictured my life as a mom, I gotta admit, I’ve gotten what I’ve always wanted: a couple kids (I guess I’m an overachiever) and the ability to leave corporate life and be a stay-at-home mom. Jon has a great career that affords us the ability for me to stay home with the kids. But with his position, depending on the time of year, he travels quite often. I refer to this time as running solo, and as y’all know, it’s the only running I do. ;). His travel is very manageable, and the trade-off is more than worth it, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t hard.

There’s a sports analogy that refers to kids outnumbering parents- moving from man-to-man to zone defense. While we’re certainly used to being outnumbered around here, when Jon is away, we move from a zone defense to an NHL worthy power play. And admittedly, a lot more time is spent in the penalty box. To put it simply: 4 kids is a lot to manage on your own. My patience runs MUCH thinner, because I have no buffer. My off button disappears. All day, every day, and night, I am solely responsible for each of their needs. There’s at least one with me all the time, and when the big kids get home from school, all hell breaks loose as 16 limbs move in all directions.

There’s no one else to respond to the billion things that come from a house full of kids. Talking to my sister the other day, she pointed out that the boys are probably pretty self-sufficient these days. While true, this comes with its own set of challenges. I’ve traded the diapers and bottles of babies for arguments and attitudes that come with bigger kids. Dish-doer, dinner-maker, tucker-inner, homework-helper, bath-starting, and sport-running. There’s no one on the ropes to tag in. I’m the only one pleading for them to settle down and stop fighting - the sole referee. I’m always the one here which makes me easier to tune out. They become numb to my pleas. To be honest, the ebb and flow kinda goes to shit when he’s gone because I just run out of steam - I’m running on E. Together we run a nice little ship, but alone, some days it’s more like a shipwreck.

10 days and 2 trips ago, I had a particularly rough day. My kids went temporarily deaf and I was at the end of my fuse. I decided to order pizza for dinner because well, why punish myself? And let’s be honest, it went better with the wine.

Last week the kids kept asking me what was wrong and my only response was, this is just my face today. I was still tired from the previous day. I had gotten up at 3am to drop Jon at the airport, drove an hour and a half to pick up the kids at grandma and grandpas, arrived to find one had yet again come down with something, drove another 3.5 hours home, complete with a pit stop that included one of my kids vomiting into a hot cakes lid since I forgot he needs a full stomach when he takes medicine. Thankfully the girls could spend the afternoon at their other grandma and grandpas while I sat for FOUR hours at baseball evaluations. Knowing this kicked off on the first day of a 4 day solitaire run - I guess I’m lucky I only looked tired.

This past Sunday, despite Jon’s departure before anyone was up, I decided to take the girls to church by myself while the boys attended their catechism classes. We go to church regularly, but knowing how they’re supposed to behave doesn’t always keep them out of trouble. Case in point, I let Tenley wander to the stained glass windows in the quiet room. While kneeling, I glanced over to find she was LITERALLY climbing the wall in church, in an attempt to touch a purple piece of the art she couldn’t quite reach from the floor. She wasn’t too happy when I pulled her down, so while I wrestled her in my lap she started yelling “LEAVE ME ALONE!”, repeatedly, DURING The Lord’s Prayer. I wonder if the “peace be with you”s that followed didn’t carry a little extra sentiment from my fellow parishioners that day. Next, at our after-church lunch, I returned from filling drinks to find Tenley had removed her SHIRT. Good thing she’s only two y’all. The afternoon was rather uneventful- the kids played really well outside with one another. I decided to take advantage of the beautiful day and cleaned my car- as an added bonus, I’m pretty certain I’m now immune to the coronavirus. But there’s no other way to describe bedtime that night except HARD. Like pick myself up off the floor, crying my eyes out hard. Toddler tantrums can be brutal y’all. I have no idea what made sweet Tenny’s night so rough, but she needed an outlet and I was the only one here. Between the cries of “I love you mom!”, I could really have used some backup, not to mention I would have loved to see her bitch slap JON with her underwear.

On normal days, bedtime serves as a reprieve from the day, and offers some quality time. But when you’re running solo, it brings a different set of challenges. Once they finally do succumb to bedtime, and sometimes much later, sleep, the house is eerily quiet. I get a little bored with no one to keep me company. My beloved podcast suddenly becomes too creepy. I don’t like to move around the house too much (weird, I know), so I usually turn to TV or Netflix, without the chill. (I only make that joke because I legitimately had no idea what Netflix and chill meant until very recently. If you’re still not sure, ask a 20-something.) Sure a little alone time is fine every once in a while but I’d really prefer the company watching trash TV and finding out if Love really is Blind. Consecutive nights filling silence with only my thoughts and TV drama gets pretty lonely.

In times of solitude I wonder if I’m the problem- is this harder because of something I’m doing or failing to do? But the more I think about it, the more I’m realizing- they’re just kids. And they’re good kids. But even with good kids, parenting is hard. And it only becomes harder when you have to go solo for a few days. The problems are all the same, it’s just much easier to become overwhelmed when half of the parenting team is missing. Extra kudos to all the single moms and military wives raising families-I don’t know how you do it. But allow me to go back to the beginning: I am lucky. And life is full of compromise. At the end of the day, you make decisions that are best for your family, but no matter what you choose, it gets hard. Truthfully, it’s not all bad. It’s just not all easy either.