Exposure and Self-Discovery on Biweekly Cycles
Our fifty-fifty coparenting schedule has determined the cadence of my growth spiral. In anticipation of the delivery of our children to my house or their mother’s the following day, Thursday evenings invite both dread and relief. The Friday mornings that follow inevitably witness intense emotions, and never just one at a time.
I keep tidy, but sharing a household with children cannot accommodate the sanitation that I prefer. Divorce, then, has selected Fridays for cleaning. Having dropped off my daughters to reside with Mom the next seven nights, I open my kitchen door to confront the silence their absence installs. Staving off the corresponding loneliness, I get busy. Podcasts or music erase the quiet as I start by returning all kid-things to kids-room, stacking books, piling stuffed animals, and scooping up socks that idle uncoupled like me. I turn next to the scattered dishes and cups - young ones seldom reuse a glass. Then it’s the floors: I sweep up the crumbs of their after-school snacks that coat every surface, often discovering bracelets and trinkets they’ll be sure to miss once they notice bare wrists and empty pockets. Finally to mop, and more often than you may believe, tears of grief leak from my eyes, an accidental additive to the cleaning solution to salt my hardwoods. House clean, I am exposed. Homesick within my own home.
They tell me it’s a virgo thing, but all the same, my kid-free calendar cannot stay empty. I seek out the company of my friends, sometimes scheduling multiple one-on-one heart-to-hearts in an evening: OD’ing on connection, as my bestie recently accused me. Clearly, I have no time to waste! And when I’m not occupied by the appointments themselves, I stare at my calendar, the most used app on my phone, even adding Premier League matches to it that I hardly plan to watch or community events I know I won’t prioritize. I add reminders for tasks that I’ll never forget to accomplish. No doubt, more than any other substitute for the attention I can no longer offer my children when they’re with their mother, it is my phone that fills the void. I open Instagram fifty times a day but close it almost immediately: both the presence and absence of little red hearts remind me that the internet will never deliver the connection for which I reach, neither with my daughters nor myself. I kicked the bottle years ago, but, to my chagrin, the grasping for wholeness outside of myself remains.
It really is this dramatic much of the time, but opposite feelings coexist and often counteract. I cherish my alone time and do not take it for granted as I witness my brothers who raise children without the luxury of quiet. Though they parent with partners, they are more tired than I am. I am an attentive friend in large part because, half the time, I’m not drowning in the flashflood of parenting under capitalism. I go dancing on Saturday nights, at least I can for two a month. Indeed, I have time to write. I can claim no certitude about alternative futures, but I doubt my journey in the direction of self-actualization and healing would have proceeded at pace without this privileged recurrence of solitude. I know and love who I am because I’ve invested time with him. While parenting remains core to my identity - and I am no less a parent when my kids are away - I benefit from the invitation to reframe my aloneness as togetherness with myself. I remember that Michael is Michael, not just Genevieve and Adelaide’s dad.
It is this whiplash that distinguishes my life pattern from most of my peers’, parents or not. My story constitutes extremes punctuated in biweekly increments. In any given cycle, it takes about four days after offering up my kids to their other parent that I actually ingest that I am not just a parent myself. I find a groove in my solo personhood by Wednesday. And then, two days later, my daughters return and, all of a sudden, that which was just Michael dissolves into middle-schoolers' needs, schedules, and mood swings. I am immersed in the opposite of solitude. Four days after that, a new groove: all that exists is my beloved family triad, the sacred space between us, however stressful it can sometimes be. And then Friday again, exposed again: they leave, and I’m left with seven days of memories, their beautiful ghosts dancing across temporarily dirty floors. Whiplash twenty-six times per year.
The morning after the first match of the season for my 6v6 recreational soccer league, it’s the smallest muscles that ache the most. While I jog all the time, my daily exercise routine does not engage those little ligaments, the ones surrounding my ankles and hips that stabilize me during sudden changes of direction such as soccer requires. As the season progresses, my recovery shortens. My stabilizing muscles strengthen as I become more accustomed to changing directions so frequently. I suspect that over time, therefore, the emotional ligaments stabilizing my heart will follow suit.
If you ask my therapist to sum up the purpose of therapy in a word, she would probably say integration. I aim to integrate the disparate parts of me into the fullness of my most authentic self. The polarity of my lifestyle can both challenge and fortify that effort. For at any given moment, you will find me both mourning and celebrating, missing my kids or missing myself, enjoying my children or enjoying their dad. No emotion ever persists without its opposite on its coattails. En route to integration, at least, the biweekly pendulum reminds me that both selves belong.
