#063023 from Athens: I have no idea what’s here for me

Thoughts on doing it for you

Per the book rec..

I got on a flight headed for Athens on Wednesday night, which I had booked the day before.

Prior to booking, I spent a lengthy string of early mornings darting awake with a sense of unrest that I realize now must have been regret that I had declined an invitation to attend an event that would bring me here for three nights.

This is the exact length of time it takes for me to recover independent, long-form thinking after bouts of time spent on the fingernail, which is what I call the tiny and safe and dull and rich, insufferable and absolutely intoxicating world that my daughters and I occupy when were together with only each other for days and days and days on end.

I didn’t think it would make sense for me to pick up and leave after two weeks on the fingernail but really, I think, I didn’t trust I could handle it. Time on the fingernail has historically made me crave nothing but consistency, routine, monotony in a way — the establishment of my own, dependable time again. To anchor into this time so I could have more of it. Time to think, time to make, time to work.

It takes days to reorient myself after I’m off the nail — to find a center, to hold a center, to remember myself not as a shuttle or bodyguard or storage container but as a sentient, lone-standing woman. And on Thursday, when I got to Athens instead of the bus stop that would commemorate a summer long ritual of dropping off my kids at 7:30 a.m., and waving goodbye until they returned at 5, my reorientation was supposed to start.

It was perfect — here my kids were going to be out each day and here I was going to ready myself to return to myself. To flex into the newfangled homecoming, its freedom.

On this term, specifically as it relates to having children and being a parent, I read something meaningful last week on what the caretakers of young kids call “freedom” (time for themselves) and what those of older kids come to know it as: loneliness.

When I read it, I understood the distinction immediately. It reminded me of that feeling when you’re traveling alone and after you get off a plane and hustle through an airport then into a car or a bus or the metro, until you get to your destination and unpack your bags then eat something and with the travel portion of your trip finally complete, you take a deep breath and look around and you’re all alone and you’re full — so suddenly you wonder, time expanding before you, with this slight twinge of terror: what should I do now?

This is a lot like what tending to young kids feels like — you’re always trying to get to some destination (bedtime, school, camp, a drop off) and then once you get there, your hands now on the brink of empty, your independence still something of an illusion, there’s this moment of dreaded wonder: now what?

But there is magic, too, I have found, in both instances when you can help yourself temper your trying so hard to get there and kind of just let the time be — be with you within it instead of on top or trying to control it. I think being with it tempers the possibility, too, that the freedom will invariably become loneliness.

What makes the moment of wondering “what now” so dreaded is that, as I experience it, it’s almost like you’re not alive in a way, let alone in relation, to what else is around you. What delights or what lessons, what wisdom appears on the path detours when you’re rushing so hard, so focused on getting to that place you are going. You miss the whole fun of the trip. You miss actually spending time your kids, you miss getting to know the local strangers, what the shape of the roads that get you there look like.

On Tuesday morning when I decided that I would leave to Athens the following night, that I would suspend reorientation for more days still, when I acknowledged that my kids were going to camp and would no longer need me the same way they did, I made a choice to not kill the magic in what else could emerge on this other path detour.

Yes, on Tuesday morning, I listened to the heed of my internal alarm, the self-possessed calling to get on a plane and go where my gut wanted to go. I heard the interior cage keepers say what they do: it’s selfish, irresponsible, unruly, just wrong but I said: get lost and just went.

I have no idea what is here for me now, but I know what is there, what I get to return to, the fingernail and all of its occupants. Something about this discrepancy — the dichotomy between there and here, between known and unknown affords me the most calming and curious thrill.