Difficult Two Weeks

The last two weeks have been difficult for me. It all started over Independence Day weekend and will thankfully be over tomorrow. I have spent these two weeks alternating between calm and taking advantage of time to relax and being worried, anxious, lonely, and miserable.

The cause of these two difficult weeks? N is away at camp. . . for two whole weeks! He and I have never been apart that long before, particularly not without having daily phone calls with each other.

Sunday before last my heart broke as I waved to him as I drove away from him, smiling and waving back at me from the bus that would take him into the deep dark wilds of the Ozarks. (okay, so it’s just YMCA camp, but still. . . ) I shed a few tears as I drove away, but soon I was buoyed by the freedom that comes from having no one for whom you must be responsible other than yourself. Woohoo! Freedom!

Instead of driving straight home I went to BJ’s, and we spent the rest of the day together. I had thoughts of us spending more time together during the week, but that didn’t really work out because he was required to man the booth his workplace had at the county fair every day that week. Bummer.

Somehow, I made do though. I had pizza for dinner most nights. Pizza is my favorite food in the whole world. I believe I could live on pizza alone. Pizza is good.

By last weekend, my appreciation of peace and quiet, and pizza, was starting to wane. How much better it would be to have a noisy boy in the house. How much better it would be to have the occasional mac & cheese dinner instead of pizza. How much better it would be to not be missing him acutely every time I looked online at the pictures posted on the camp’s website.

This week has been not much better, although I did vary my menu slightly. As a matter of fact, I haven’t had pizza all this week. I’ve had spaghetti, and stir fry, and mac & cheese (ok, maybe I was missing the boy a bit that night), and omelet for dinners this week. Well, and two of those nights I had dinner with BJ so that was nice. But I still eventually had to go home to an empty house. The dog and I would play a bit with his toys, but we both missed our boy. Eventually, I’d go to bed and think about how N might be handling the second week away from home and hoping he was doing better than I was.

So tomorrow morning I pick up N at the same location where I left him almost two weeks ago. He will be tired. He will be grumpy. He will be hungry. We will go to Chevy’s for lunch before making the three hour drive home. Hopefully, he will sleep much of that three hours. We will go see the new Harry Potter movie on Sunday.

And life will return to normal.