I lost my cool with my kid tonight and – unsurprisingly – this wasn’t the first time. I let my immediate feelings of anger and frustration win out over my steady undercurrent of patience. It had been one of those days wherein every single thing that could go even slightly wrong, had, with each setback causing irreparable distress for my little drama queen.

We didn’t get the lid on the sippy cup screwed on right and milk spilled all over the carseat. We forgot the blankie at home; I zipped her heel up in her sandal while putting it on. Admittedly that last one justified tears, but it still felt like the zillionth freak out in twelve hours.

As I was trying to clean up our dinner of nutrionless frozen pizza – which I’d also burned – Skye was a heap on the floor next to me fake-crying over my most recent use of the word no.

She sat up and clung to my leg, forcing me to drag her screaming body along the floor with me as I walked out of the kitchen.

And just like that, I snapped. I freed myself from her grip long enough to step out of the room. I could feel my wheels about to fly off. On my way out I made the mistake of mumbling my frustrated feelings to myself, apparently just loud enough for my daughter to hear.

“Why Skye,” I asked the ceiling. “Why can’t you just leave me alone, for two minutes?!

Behind me, her cries went from half-fake to fully real. “I don’t want you to leave me alone Mommy,” she sobbed.

My frustration immediately dissolved into gut-twisting guilt. Of course I didn’t really want her to leave me alone, I just needed a couple of minutes to come down off my anger cliff.

When Skye goes to her dad’s, like she’s about to do, alone takes on a whole new meaning for me. She spends three out of every nine weeks in Denver with him, and there are times while she’s gone that I go days without talking to another human. I’m constantly listening to music, mostly just to hear the sound of a voice that’s not my own.

When she’s gone, I’m more alone than I ever have been before.

I am not an only child; I grew up in a house full of boys, surrounded constantly by noise. I can only handle complete silence for a short amount of time before I feel the need to fill that empty space.

People frequently tell me how lucky I am to get that break, to have a few weeks to reset myself and not be someone’s lifeline. And I know that I am. The first two years of being a mom without that break proved to me how soul-crushing the job of single parent can sometimes be.

At the same time, whenever she heads off down the road I can feel a piece of myself going with her. I’ve never missed anyone the way I miss Skye when she’s with her dad. I’m 25 and I still call my mom almost every day, but even that absence can’t compare to missing my baby girl. It’s like I miss her with every part of me; my heart beats are weaker without her here, my lungs can’t quite fill themselves with enough air.

I can’t really be me, without her.

I try to take advantage of my alone time; I visit friends I haven’t seen enough of, I usually try to go out at least once, and I clean the house in much less time without the assistance of my “helper.”

During those weeks I try to remember that I am just 25 – a single girl with all the world before me and nothing tying me down.

Yet there’s still the voice inside that reminds me that this freedom is temporary, and that really, I’m nothing like most 25-year-olds I know. Even when she’s not here, my thoughts are never far from my daughter.

I don’t actually want that constant freedom, or even the silence. I know that it would only come at the price of not hearing my daughter’s laughter or the sounds of her giving voices to her toys.

If I had the choice, I’d rather be surrounded by the sounds of my child screaming and crying all day long, than go any significant amount of time being deafened by the sounds of silence that her absence leaves behind.

 

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