This past weekend, my husband attended a family wedding and took my kids to visit his mother while I stayed behind and covered his shift with our family business. I knew this weekend was coming, and as sad as I was to miss the festivities I kind of looked forward to the solitude of a weekend spent alone. I do not know what to do with a quiet house but thought I could really use to time for reflection and introspection. Those are scary words, aren’t they? In fact, I have faced the “weekend alone” option a few times throughout our marriage, but circumstances have always provided a stay of execution at the last minute.

On the first night, I had a couple of friends take me to dinner and drinks.  A couple of hours later I was home and curled up in my favorite spot, my husband’s dent in our bed. I felt close to him and since I was both under the weather and very tired, I barely noticed the emptiness in my home. The next morning, when I eventually woke myself, the silence in my house was nearly suffocating. All day, I tried to balance out the facing of my fears with the desire to stay busy or gone. Eventually, I was going to have to come to terms with the unsettled mess of emotions I was experiencing, but apparently this was not that time. This was the time for me to drive myself crazy with insecurities and fears. At first I washed the sheets to keep me from just going to bed at 6:30, then I was angry at myself for washing my husband’s scent off of them.

The list of doubts raging through my head ran from “are they going to make it home?”, to “who’s bed is my husband in?” None of these fears are completely rational, but let me tell you that it takes every ounce of my brain to talk myself down off the ledge of that kind of doubt. Even now that they are all home and everything is fine, I still feel my heart beating out of my chest just thinking about the emptiness and terror I experienced this weekend. I have some work to do to get back to normal, and now that I have opened Pandora’s box I have a lot of work to do to figure out the source of this paralyzing vault of crazy. I only hope that this new touch of nutzo isn’t enough to make my husband leave me…on Christmas… with my best friend… and have my kids liking their new mommy better.