Be Careful What you Wish For-You Might Just Get It.

I'm sitting here at the computer, typing. Except for the dog barking in my neighbor's yard it is silence. No giggling, no wailing, no sound of an open palm coming into contact with someone else's head. There are no crumbs on my floor, no one is asking me for a snack, or wanting to know if we can play with the play-doh cause this time they promise they won't break it into little pieces and throw it around the kitchen. No, today I've got what I have I prayed for on so many endless, grey Sundays: a day to myself. No, the kids aren't at a birthday party (that was yesterday) or enjoying an afternoon down at the neighbors, instead they have gone all the way to Rome with Lorenzo to spend a week with their grandparents so that mommy can go to a convention for work and not be missed too much. Somehow the stars have aligned and I have won the prize, I get to miss out on a stressful week with children suffering from over permessive grandparent overload in the uncomfortable presence of my in-laws (though I am missing the chance to eat pizza in my old neighborhood in Rome). Instead I am here, in my clean house and in two days I have to go to Monte Carlo and stay in a four star hotel, and do whatever it is that people do at conventions, and yet, I'm not lying on my couch stretched out and thinking, "this is the life." Instead I am pacing around the house and watching the clock as time crawls by, if I smoked I would be puffing away like someone on an episode of "Mad Men".

I was totally not expecting this. When I told my friend Karin on Wednesday that I was going to get two days to myself she told me that she would kill to have a day to herself, she would kill at least a spider or a small rodent to have that, and I knew what she meant. I can still remember back in March when I went to Germany how I LOVED that one morning waking up by myself, taking a bath (in the morning!) and getting me, myself, and I ready to go without having to coax anyone out of their pajamas, or scrape soggy cereal bits out of a highchair seat. Instead this morning after tearful goodbye with my children who were more interested in the DVD already playing on the car player to really look at me or wonder why mommy was sniffling in their ears as she gave them kisses, I found I no longer felt like spending the morning in bed.

I went back into the house and proceeded to clean the kitchen, go running, read the New York Times, make beds, start to pack my suitcase, run a load of laundry through the dryer, fold it, eat lunch, run another load through the washer and hang it up outside, iron a mountain of clothes, give myself a face mask, leg wax, file and buff my nails, polish my boots, finish packing my suitcase for my trip, and still get in three episodes of The Wire. All before four o'clock. I can't concentrate on any books, the though of giving a whole movie my attention seems exhausting. It seems that not only am I not used to being alone, I am not used to being able to concentrate on something for more than 10 minutes at a time. A desperate message to my brother (who is very good at enjoying the benefits of being a young man without a wife or small children) to call me has gone ignored, I guess because he is probably still sleeping, it is only around 11 am in New York right now.

Lorenzo called at 2:30 to tell me that they got there OK, and he put the kids on the phone, Livia with her typical husky "Hi Mommy" made me choke up, while Giulio's breezy announcement that they were going to have pasta for lunch made me want to climb through the fun and hug him. And it has only been a few hours. I realize that the noise, the crumbs, the tears, the mess, the hugs and kisses, the voice in my ear at 6 am asking for food are as much of a part of me as breathing. I know I could get used to this, this being alone, putting something down and coming back an hour later and finding it in the same place, but today it is hard. At the same time it is nice to know that for how much I complain, the frustration I often feel when I am on my own with the kids for days at a time, that in the end it is exactly what I want. That honestly (except for these four days in Monte Carlo) I wouldn't want it any other way.