A Typical Day Parenting When My Husband is Out of Town

I can do this. I am the best mother in the world. Oh no, everyone is crying.

5:07 am: My husband leans over and kisses me. He’s leaving for the airport to go to Boston for a three-day work trip. For the next four hours, while I get the kids ready for school, he will sit on the subway, wait in the airport, and then sit on a plane with nothing to do but probably scroll through his phone.

He’s so lucky, I think, but at least I get to go back to sleep and go back to sleep.

5:30 am: Twenty-two minutes later, my five-year-old son comes bounding into the room and jumps on the bed to wake me up.

My son climbs under the covers to cuddle with me and asks to watch Instagram videos on my phone. We watch videos from a heavily tattooed Gen Z pet influencer who has four cats, a dog, a tortoise, and a lizard.

6:10 am: During some sponcon of the influencer cracking a raw quail egg over her cats’ freeze-dried raw pet food, my two-year-old daughter waddles into the room and climbs into bed. For a moment, as she climbs under the covers, I breathe in the sweet smell of my two children huddled next to me: a warm diaper-y smell with a hint of morning breath, Johnson’s baby shampoo. This isn’t so bad, I think as we all settle in to watch the next video: sponcon for a Ring camera that films her pets having a dance party after she leaves for the grocery store.

IS THIS REAL? My five-year-old asks me, and I contemplate how to explain the varying levels of reality represented in this young woman’s internet presence. Yes, the cats are real. Yes, Ring cameras are real and have probably paid her more than my monthly salary to make this one video. No, the cats probably did not actually have a dance party. No, her skin probably does not look that glowy in real life. This is what we call “advertising” and “a really good filter”.

6:13 am: I WANT HELLO KITTY, my daughter, her damp diaper against my bare leg, demands.

My son, whose elbow is now so deep into my boob I contemplate if this counts as a mammogram, responds, I DON’T WANT HELLO KITTY.

The children speak in what can only be described as capital letters. Loud, bold, sometimes grammatically incorrect.

They start to push each other over my body. The capital letters intensify. I imagine what my husband is doing right now, probably drinking a $9 Starbucks coffee and scrolling r/treelaw on his phone, where people discuss various legal problems they have with their neighbors’ trees. He’s so lucky, I think again.

6:27 am: Let’s go downstairs, I suggest, and everyone switches from screaming at each other to crying at me so we watch Hello Kitty and the Gen Z petfluencers videos back and forth until my five-year-old declares it’s time to get up and tunnels through the blankets to the foot of the bed.

I WANT TO GO IN CAVE TOO LIKE ELLIOT! My two-year-old cries and I tell her go ahead, but for some reason, that’s not sufficient, like perhaps she thinks she needs to sign some sort of waiver to do this type of bed spelunking, and instead she opts to cry at me some more.

I black out for several minutes, and somehow we are all downstairs.

7:12 am: I start to make coffee while my children both try to talk to me at once. They both want a popsicle. Sure, I say. It’s 7:12 am, but why not? But I’m not stupid enough to just hand them popsicles from the fridge. Instead, I covertly look inside the popsicle box and determine which colors we have left. If there’s only one of a certain color, I can’t offer that one because whoever didn’t get that color will all of a sudden want the one their sibling has. There’s only one orange, but two purples and two reds.

Do you want purple or red? I ask. I’m so smart. A genius. I can totally handle getting two kids ready for school by myself because I am the best mother ever.

I WANT ORANGE, my two-year-old wails. Fuck, I forgot she knew orange existed just generally.

I try to explain that there is no orange, but she can sense my weakness. She’s not tall enough to see into the freezer, but she is two enough to see into my soul, and she knows I’m lying. The tears flow again. Is that coffee ready yet? Damnit, no, I forgot to make it.

I stupidly reveal the orange popsicle as if I just found it in the back of the fridge. Maybe the five-year-old won’t want it.

I WANT ORANGE! The five-year-old yells. I imagine what my husband is doing at the airport right now. Probably drinking a mimosa in business class. I make a mental note to murder him.

7:21 am: I black out again, and both children are eating two popsicles at once. Somehow, the five-year-old has the orange one, but nobody is crying, so I assume in my blackout I must have administered some sort of brilliant conflict mediation and/or the five-year-old hit the two-year-old on the head with his robot gripper arm until she relinquished the orange popsicle. Somehow, in the blackout, I’ve also made coffee, which is a bonus.

7:29 am: I start to make lunches, and the children scream at me to play with them in the basement. If my husband were home, I could make lunches while he played with them in the basement. I ask if perhaps they could play with each other in the basement, seeing as they are both children and they both want to play in the basement, and I have to make their healthy, trash-free, nut-free lunches so their school doesn’t send home a mean note about how I packed something illegal and I am going to jail. They act like I’ve asked them to play with a pack of wild boars with flamethrowers. They couldn’t possibly play with each other. So I throw some cherry tomatoes and a string cheese in each lunch and take my rapidly cooling coffee down to the basement, but by the time I’ve gotten down there, they have decided to play with each other and the game is Hit Each Other and Jump on Stuff. Then the game is Crying.

8:12 am: Despite us all waking up before 7am, somehow it’s suddenly 8:12am and we have exactly seven minutes to eat breakfast, get dressed, and walk to the bus stop. My daughter wants 17 strips of bacon for breakfast. My son wants freshly-made Belgian waffles. I give them both toast and a cut-up apple. I imagine my husband eating those Biscoff plane cookies and make another mental note to murder him. I eat leftover apple core for breakfast.

8:19 am: They don’t eat a single bite of breakfast and demand I read them three books while we eat, which makes it difficult for me to finish my leftover apple core. With barely any time left, I throw on their clothes and throw their pajamas in a pile on the dining room floor. I try to rush them out the door, but they sense we are in a hurry and both start crying because they bit each other, and the two-year-old remembers Goldfish exist due to a brief mention of crackers in a Little Critter book and wants some. We don’t have any. I told her they have Goldfish at school (they don’t), and she agrees to stop crying if she can bring a wagon full of garbage with her to the bus stop.

8:29 am: We all trudge three blocks to the bus stop, frequently stopping to replace fallen garbage from the wagon. Suddenly, the children are getting along and playing happily together, collecting acorns on the side of the road instead of walking forward to the bus, which is expected to arrive in 30 seconds.

8:30 am: I black out again, and suddenly I’m waving goodbye to my five-year-old and walking back home with my two-year-old to get in the car to take her to preschool. I try to strap her into her seat, but it’s difficult since she’s brought four stuffed animals and a doll stroller.

8:39 am: We set off and listen to Let it Go six times. Every time she says, IT’S YOUR FAVORITE SONG MAMA and I nod in agreement, even though if I hear this song one more time, I’m going to personally find Idina Menzel’s home address and demand retribution.

8:59 am: I drop my daughter off at school and finally can breathe for a second. I immediately turn on the radio station where people have the radio hosts call their cheating spouses pretending to be a flower shop and try to get them to confess to their infidelity by sending roses to their side piece. Four minutes of pure bliss.

9:19 am: I arrive at HIIT class and push a heavy metal sled around a gym located inside a strip mall for 45 minutes. It’s the easiest part of my day. I come home and start work.

12:17 pm: I blackout, and suddenly it’s time to pick up my daughter, as she has been at preschool for her allotted 15 minutes a day.

12:35 pm: I hold her hand as we walk out of the school, and she tells me what they did that day: Art class, sang a song about penguins, a boy named Brownie (will investigate his real name later) also had string cheese for lunch, but she doesn’t like string cheese. I feel her warm little hand in mine and squeeze it. For the first time today, I feel lucky to be here and not in Boston, chatting with my daughter on a warm fall afternoon, sprigs of wild goldenrod line the street on the way to the car. This moment feels like the soft golden glow of their flowers, pillowy and soft. When we get home, I’ve already planned to make cookies and Halloween bracelets with the kids, because if I don’t have some sort of activity planned, the activity will be Yell at Each Other.

I think maybe my time with my kids when I’m parenting alone is actually me at my best. It’s twice as chaotic, twice as tiring, but with nobody to fall back on, I am more present, more fun, more prepared, but less worried about screen time or sugar, because there’s too much other stuff to take care of. I think about my husband going to bed tonight alone in his hotel. How he’ll lie down on the cool, clean sheets and watch TV while I cuddle with my kids and read books on the couch, eating warm cookies. They will argue over who gets to sit the closest to me. All they want is me, me, me. They are the North and South poles of the magnet, but I am the big silver ball it sticks to. I will feel exhausted in a way I never knew before children, but I’ll also feel accomplished in a way I never knew. I make a mental note not to murder my husband after all.

12:36 pm: Then the golden color of the flowers reminds my two-year-old of the Goldfish I never provided for her. She starts to cry at me again. Only two and a half more days.