Me, alone at home

I took today off in lieu of some overtime owing to me... it's not exactly policy, but it's something my office has always allowed us to do... the overtime money is so heavily taxed & I'd much rather have the time off anyway.

I didn't do much (I never do wind up doing half the things I think I'm going to do)... I slept in & read the papers leisurely over a cup of tea. I wasted some time on the Internet, did a few loads of laundry, did the cleaning (so I won't have to do it tomorrow, which is when it usually gets done). Watched Oprah at 4.

Some days like this, I will decide to scrapbook all day. Or I'll sit on the couch or out on the front porch with a good book or stack of magazines & a cup of tea, or glass of iced tea. Sometimes I feel guilty for not being "productive," but I figure I work hard five days a week, six if you count the cleaning & laundry I usually wind up doing on Saturday (dh mows the lawn & does the vacuuming while I do that). It's nice to give yourself permission to be "lazy" sometimes.

Much as I love dh & being with him, I also love my "me" time, & "me alone at home" time in particular. I try not to talk about this too much in front of my friends with children. I imagine that, in their eyes, ALL my time is "me" time, because I don't have children to be constantly monitoring or ushering off to soccer practice or Guides.

But as I wrote several months back, parents don't have a monopoly on being busy. And while I will agree that I have more discretionary time at my disposal than most parents, "me alone" & "me alone at home" time is rarer than you might think.

Dh & I, I think it is safe to say, spend a lot more time together than the average couple. (We actually get kidded about it sometimes.) We work in the same office tower, albeit several dozen floors apart. We get up at the same time, commute to work together & then meet up again at the end of the day for the return trip home. We generally don't see each other during the work day, but we call each other a couple of times a day. Once in awhile, if he's going to be working late & I'm going to head home by myself, we'll arrange to have an afternoon coffee together.

On a typical day, we're up at 5, leave the house by 6:30, in the office between 8 & 4:30, & don't return until around 5:30. By the time dinner gets cooked, eaten & cleaned up, it's mid-evening, & usually we're too tired to go out (although on the occasions when we do drag ourselves out, we find reserves of energy we didn't think we had!).

Most of our friends & family don't live very close to us anyway, & of course they're all busy themselves, so we don't get out much on weeknights. I have a couple of girlfriends I will meet for scrapbooking once a month or so, & during the winter, I take a weekly yogalates class. And we facilitate our pg loss support group together, two evenings a month. Dh doesn't have a lot of guy friends that he spends time with. He used to meet up with some of his cousins for golf now & then, but as everyone has gotten married & (yep) had kids, those golf games have fallen by the wayside. I used to travel a little for business, but with technology & budget cuts, etc., I haven't been asked to do that in 10 years.

So it's actually quite rare for me to have some time to myself alone, at home. Maybe not as rare as a mother with toddlers, but still not very often. And I enjoy it. I spent a lot of time by myself growing up & as a young adult at university. I'm not afraid to be alone (although the few times in our marriage when dh had to be away from me overnight, I didn't sleep very well...!). When there's two of us in the house, even if we're not in the same room, we're very much aware of what each other is doing. If the cleaning is done & we have an entire day to ourselves -- say, a Sunday afternoon or a statutory holiday (as we'll have on Tuesday -- Canada Day) -- dh gets bored quite easily, & doesn't like sitting around the house too long. So we usually find ourselves looking for some excuse to get out of the house for awhile, even if it's just for a coffee at Starbucks.

If I'm home by myself & I've decided that it's going to be a cleaning/organizing day, I do a much better job than when dh is looking over my shoulder & making comments about what I'm choosing to throw out (or, more likely, what I'm NOT throwing out, lol -- I'm the packrat of the family). I can go full speed ahead with whatever project I'm focused on, without having dh asking when we're going to have lunch. If I've decided to be a couch potato, I finally get to control the clicker!! (even though daytime television seems to be a total wasteland these days). Sometimes it's just nice to turn it off & enjoy the silence. (Hmmm, and parents think our lives are so different...)

And when you spend a little time apart, even for just a few hours, you have the fun of coming back together again, & talking about the different things you did that day, and appreciating the other person even more. ; )

Do you feel like you get enough "me time," & how do you like to spend it?