Solitude

I've often described myself as an outgoing introvert.

It fits.

I can be social and outgoing and personable when the occasion warrants such things.

But to recharge, I need alone time. Truly alone time. Not alone with my family, but all by myself alone time.

That time after Tom and the girls are all asleep and I'm in the bath, with the door closed and the heater running and it's just me and the bubbles and my smutty romance novel, those are the times that I recharge, that I find balance and a sense of self that allows me to greed the next day much too early and cheerfully share a bowl of corn flakes with Olivia and play a game of Battleship with Alyssa and joke and tease Tom in the kitchen as I wash the dishes and he changes the batteries in Alyssa's Zhu Zhu pets for the third time in the same amount of days.

I've been lonely in my life but never when I'm alone.

My loneliest times have come when I'm in a crowded room or when I was with one other person but we weren't on the same page in life. Those were lonely times.

But the four years I lived in Chicago and spent weekends upon weekends speaking to no one but the cashier who traded me groceries for my money, those times weren't lonely. I look fondly upon those times of aloneness.

Yesterday, Olivia was playing with her two new little dolls. She was marching them up and down the stairs of her doll house.

She'd announced earlier in the day that the bigger doll was Lyssie (she has longer hair than the littler doll) and the smaller doll with the shorter hair was Livie.

At one point, I heard Olivia speaking for the big doll. She was ordering the little doll to "come down here RIGHT NOW." And I smiled to myself, thinking that Alyssa often tries to boss her little sister around.

I asked Olivia if the little sister was going to do what the big sister told her to do, and Olivia said with a resigned sigh, "Yes."

And the little sister marched her little self down those stairs.

At the same time that Olivia was occupied with her dolls and their house, Alyssa was outside in the backyard, throwing herself down snow drifts and climbing into and jumping out of her fort (which, this spring, will have the slide and swings reattached.)

I wondered if they were lonely in their individual, solidary play. And I worried.

Then I remembered the many years of imaginary play I'd had. The hours and hours and hours I spend outside, by myself, playing on the tireswing, weaving tales and creating imaginary friends and living a life right there inside my head that had nothing to do with my real life.

Those were not lonely times for me and I have to believe that solitary play isn't lonely for my girls. Their imaginations will take them far and keep them company even in a crowded room where the loneliness threatens to overtake them.

They're resilient. They're creative.

And when they're bored or lonely, they seek out company, just like I do.

They'll be okay.

Just like I am.