Home Alone

It's going to be great. I will have the house to myself, I will clean things and they will remain that way until I render them dirty. I will control the remote.

I won't know what to do with myself.

But I'd like to try.

I am sending my sister to Memphis in lieu of yours truly. We talked about it on the drive down for Christmas. I really don't want to go. I really don't want to go anywhere. I am feeling very spoiled and very single. I am starting to value the single friend over other friends because we have more time to be a part of eachother's lives. Available to one another. We aren't just footnotes appended to husbands and kids who take precedence. And they should take precedence, but I shouldn't feel bad if I don't want to figure out a way to shoehorn into that. If I don't want to start a conversation because you never really have to the time to finish one. That's what life is for 90 percent of the people I know and I just realized there is a flip side to my gratitude for their efforts to include a relationship with me into an already full dance card of relationships. I want to stop feeling bad because as the single one, I don't visit as often as my relationship status implies I should be able to. I haven't taken a vacation since 2001 and as lovely as it always is to see the people I love and as deeply as I am truly touched to be considered a part of the family, I came for you and you are not available to me. Worse, I am yet another person vying for your attention and time and it's hard to be in the middle of a story or discussion that is interrupted with a phone call, a cry, a tug on the sleeve, a sidebar with the spouse. It's hard not to just drop it. Drop it until the kids start school or the husband is out of town, just push pause on the participation grade in our friendship until you need me again. Better to acknowledge and live that I think maybe than try to make something fit where there is no room right now.

Wasn't thinking this post was going to turn into the Spinster manifesto but I guess that's where I'm coming from tonight.