Loneliness

I am discovering loneliness. I think loneliness feels different in a foreign country. The loneliness of a parent is not the same loneliness of a single person. If I am honest, I think when I was single and kid-less, I only ever experienced loneliness when surrounded by people, never when alone. I have always been content to be on my own, glad for the chance to read uninterrupted for hours or watch movies or swim or do any number of things I cannot do with a person or groups of people. My mother says that when I was an infant, she could strap me in the bouncy seat in front of the picture window and clean the entire house without hearing a peep from me. I wasn’t asleep, just endlessly fasinted by the goings on outside our house, or amusing myself with my own made up stories, I guess. What stories a 6-month-old tells herself while waiting for the vacuuming to cease I will leave to conjecture. Also, cleaning the whole house while the baby is strapped in a bouncy seat in another room: neglect, or efficient parenting providing the opportunity to develop a sense of imagination? Discuss.

I think loneliness for single parents the world over must be hard, but for single adoptive parents even more so. At least if you are a single parent due to divorce, if you have a serious problem with your kid, you can generally call up the ex and discuss how you should handle it: discipline, a good talking to, whatever. As a single adoptive parent in a foreign country, I find myself lonely for the companionship of having someone to be a sounding board for these things. Maybe that isn’t loneliness; maybe it’s missing something that never existed. But, I think, if I were in the US, there are many people I could call up at a moment’s notice to get sound advice about these things. Here, I have skype and acquaintances to ask, but it’s not the same. Maybe that’s not loneliness either, maybe it’s missing something I once had.

Sophie goes to camp tomorrow for 3 days, and I find myself feeling her absence already. Three days of alone time could be a gift, but I am not sure if I should feel obligated to fill up the empty time by being social and spending time with people I rarely see, now that I’m a parent and working full-time, or if I am allowed to just sit home and chill out without feeling guilty about NOT feeling guilty. The times in which I have long stretches of alone time, I find are the loneliest of all, recently.  My days here are so full of Taw Saeng, Sophie and the million things to do around the house, I don’t have time to miss anything, only time to enjoy my life here. But when I take the time and let myself think, I find I miss people profoundly.

There are not many things I can say I miss about the US: the smell of the magnolias in the summer evenings driving over the Sepulveda Pass, the scent of the woods in Washington State, the sight of Los Angeles and all its neighborhoods decorated for Christmas, the view of the city at night from the top of Mulholland. But I CAN say that I miss people. It’s painful to be away from people and not have the freedom to just hang out or call them up to check in anytime I feel like it, so I just avoid thinking about them, or emailing them or checking their Facebook status updates because it reminds me of the vast distance between us. I know, we live in a world of skype, Gmail chat, etc, but that is not the same as sitting in a room and having a conversation that can last hours and range from talking about Castle (that’s a TV show, btw) to where we want to be in 10 years. It’s that empty space where a tangible relationship once was that creates the loneliness I feel now. Because when I allow myself to think about the lives that people are living that I am now not a part of, the missing slams into me with a force like a cement fist to my chest. The intensity blindsides me with its unexpectedness and leaves me gasping.

Looking forward to 3 days with no parenting duties, I think about what I would do if I were faced with three days of free time in LA. I would call Wednesday to go see a movie at the AMC Burbank 16 and go movie hopping….I mean buy tickets to three movies in a day; then, go window shopping or ice skating. I would call up Rosa and geek out about Harry Potter and Les Mis and what books we are currently reading and how they are changing our worldviews. I would go over to Helen and Todd’s place and have dinner with their family, and braid Maya’s hair and talk about Ethan’s sports stats this season. I would go with Trina and Brady and Oliver to the beach and play in the sand. But, I can’t do any of that here because I am here and they are there and that is what it is. And so, I feel lonely. I have been reading Lauren Winner’s book Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis and she talks about loneliness as if it were a person. She says that loneliness “takes a letter opener from her bag and tells me she can kill me if she wants to.”  I don’t think my loneliness is quite that dramatic or direct, but it’s an interesting visual, no?

So, I will sit with my loneliness, and as Lauren Winner suggests, “see what it has for me.” Who knows what new insights may appear?