Home Alone? Better Than a Spa Any Day

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been away from my children before.

I’ve left them at home with their father while I traveled on business. Once, my husband and I went skiing and left them with a baby sitter.

But this was different. Very different. This was the weekend I would be alone, without my children, without my husband and in my own home.

Now, I love my kids and husband to the moon. But ask any mother (particularly those who work outside the home) how often she has her house to herself long enough for some significant mental and physical healing to mystically occur, and you’ll get a blank stare in return. It happens to me about as often as a full eclipse of the sun. Which is to say: Since my first child was born 8 1/2 years ago, I haven’t been alone in my own house for more than two hours.

The two-hour respite--I remember it like it was yesterday--was last year when Mike took both girls to see “Pocahontas.”

But that all changed recently when Mike took the girls camping as part of an Indian Princesses event. (Indian Princesses, for you non-parents, is a kind of father-daughter Scout troop that I highly recommend should you ever convert one room to a nursery.)

And now I’m here to tell you, mothers of the world, that being home alone for a weekend is better than a trip to Golden Door spa. We all deserve a huge chunk of time to ourselves occasionally. I know women who daydream about being hospitalized just to get some time to lie in bed alone and do nothing.

Think about it. What would you do with a weekend alone in your house?

I kicked off the weekend by bleaching the grout in my kitchen floor. This is something I normally would not do, evidenced by the fact that I could not recall the original color of the grout. But with no one demanding dinner and the dirty grout staring at me, I threw caution to the wind and grabbed the Tilex. That took three hours.

After that, I took a hot bath, minus my 5-year-old throwing bath beads at me.

After that, I’m ashamed to admit, I opened a bottle of champagne that had been chilling in the refrigerator for about four years in the event of a special occasion. Realizing that I probably was not going to win the lottery or the Publishers Clearinghouse, being alone in my home was elevated to special-occasion status.

I drank two glasses.

Then I watched a trashy TV movie uninterrupted and went to bed.

On Saturday, I slept until the outrageous hour of 8 a.m. After that I watched my alma mater play football on ESPN, shopped, had my hair done and shopped some more. I don’t think I looked at my watch once. And the weirdest part was I never hurried anywhere. I strolled. I lingered. I relaxed. Not once did I say, “Girls, stop it.”

The only glitch in my weekend occurred late Saturday when I put the dog in her usual spot in the garage for the night. The lock on the door into the house snapped shut and I was stuck, without a key, in the garage.

Now, being alone in the garage is not the same as being alone in the house. I thought about asking my neighbor to call a locksmith, but I knew that would take at least an hour. Not wishing to lose a single second of My Weekend Home Alone, I used a baseball bat to, uh, regain entry. I only lost about five minutes of aloneness.

I also lost a door, but we’re talking priorities here.

On Sunday, I slept in again and anticipated the return of my three filthy campers. They arrived home while I was at church, and by the time I got home, Mike had the girls bathed and in clean clothes. Luck was truly with me.

OK, OK. So I didn’t go nightclub hopping, have the girlfriends over for poker or drink the entire bottle of champagne. Still, I had a great time.

I realized the recuperative powers of aloneness when I handled the six loads of laundry, the demands for attention and the temper tantrums the rest of Sunday without the smile leaving my face.

I didn’t utter a negative word when I inquired about the girls’ nutrition over the weekend and was informed that they “mainly ate cookies.”

I didn’t even care that no one noticed the sparkling clean grout.