***

I set my alarm for 6am, which hopefully, hopefully gives me a small window of time before the kids stir for me to walk the neighborhood. I start the coffee and the tick tick gurgle of the percolator gets my heart jumping before I’ve even sipped the caffeine. I slip a bra under my pajamas and lace up my green Nike knock off shoes: quarantine, but make it fashion. Ha. 

I step out into the cool fog and drink in the misty air, the delicious silence. Still on my front stoop, I open my “running” app to track my course, which usually consists of a 20 minute walk along our hiking trail, with multiple breaks to take pictures of green rolling hills, steam rising off the lake, or the newest fuschia and lavender blooms. I start towards the sidewalk when I hear the cries, the scream I would recognize anywhere, coming from my daughter’s window, loud enough to pierce the still, morning air and shatter any hopes of alone time. 

I whisper a curse, click Stop Workout on my app, and pivot my cheap shoes back into the house to start the day. 

***

I never missed a workout when I was single, living with my girlfriends. I could wake up and take off and I came home for a fresh shower, not a screaming toddler. I didn't have to sneak alone time into the cracks of my day, yet I didn't have to be alone, either.

Now I miss those girlfriends, that community, the sisterhood we built in college.

Many of us are now mamas; all of us have a significant other that we share our life with. We are no longer roommates. We no longer brew french press coffee together on slow Saturday mornings. We no longer strategize Costco runs or split coffee creamer (we followed the evolution from Coffee Mate to soy based to coconut creamer--now would we share oat milk?, I don’t even know). We don’t grill chicken for dinner or throw together epic salads with whatever ingredients we have on hand from our CSA veggie box. We no longer debrief after long days at work, griping about our bosses or finding subtle ways to steer the conversation back to our latest office crush. 

More than my freedom, I miss belonging to them. I miss knowing who prefers red wine to white, who would be into the current rose, and even frose, trend. I miss knowing their skincare routines (I know for sure we’d all be team BeautyCounter now thanks to my friend, Drewsie), sharing clothes and makeup and playlists. 

It feels like treason to miss that stage of life. Like I’m ungrateful for the life I have now. A life where my roommates consist of a 20-month-old and a 3-year-old who love to talk about butts and toots and Daniel Tiger and a husband who is working full time from home.

And it’s not like the quarantine did this to us. My friends and I have been drifting into different stages, different seasons, even different states, long before coronavirus and shelter-in-place orders. 

This time of more pronounced physical separation has highlighted the metaphorical distance that was already there.

We are no longer each other's go-to people, not in the day-to-day details. We check in with husbands and significant others, base our days around nap schedules and work meetings, not roommate hangouts or happy hours.

We've been apart for a long time, but I'm just now putting a finger to the wound, feeling it pulsing beneath the surface, a dull and steady ache. A longing to belong to something outside my little family. 

***

All this longing and missing has made me pretty crazy with my phone. 

I feel like Leslie Knope on the Parks and Rec Covid special--wanting to be talking to all my friends all the time, not wanting to be left out. Organizing zoom meetings and text convos.

I find myself glued to my screen even while my kids play. While I nurse my daughter, I’m skimming an Instagram story on body neutrality from an influencer I’ve never met and wondering why my feed is filled with more and more strangers as my real life friends post less and less. 

I’m so busy scrolling I miss the way the light hits my daughter’s wispy curls and the sound of gentle sucking as she snuggles in. I want some kind of outside validation so badly, I miss the sweetness right under my nose. 

I can’t help but take it personally when my friends don’t reply on my timeline, when I’m the only one initiating, pursuing. I know in my head that people are coping in their own ways. Some people are backing away from technology just as hard as I’m digging in. 

But it still hurts. 

***

Back in January I thought it was a good idea to come up with a focus for the year and I chose that I wanted to learn to “sit in the hard.” Oh boy, I really asked for it, didn’t I? Never did I imagine this much hard swirling world around us, and this much sitting. 

I’ve been trying to sit with this loneliness and see where God is moving, what He is pointing me to.

How much of this loneliness is my God-given ache for connection and how much am I seeking to validate my own worth, my own worthiness, in my connection with others? 

All this time, have I kept busy with playdates and small groups and a jam-packed schedule to validate my life as a mom? 

I’ve always been a mom AND a teacher, a professor, a friend. I love working part-time--I love challenging my brain, adult interaction, getting out of the house (pre-quarantine), but how much of my job has insulated me from these feelings of worth and worthiness that my “just a mom” friends have wrestled with from the beginning?

I know two things that seem at odds: my desire to connect with others, to reach out, to not stay insulated, is God-given, and yet no amount of text messages or check-ins can make me worthy. 

This work is internal. This work is my own.

Maybe for me, learning to be apart, together is learning to be present with my current reality. To disconnect my worth from phone buzzes, likes, and Zoom hangouts (which everyone is tired of anyways). 

Perhaps being a good friend in this season may sometimes look like leaving special gift deliveries and sending texts and organizing hangouts.  

But maybe the harder part for me, the true work, may not entail reaching out, but settling in. Maybe it’s being content at home, nursing a toddler in silence, giving up my morning walks every now and then. 

Like the time a couple weeks ago when I fought the urge to text during nap time and instead brainstormed activities my three-year-old would enjoy. Instead of obsessively checking my phone, I wrote out the alphabet on 26 pieces of scratch paper and taped the large letters around the living room with blue painter’s tape. When I brought him down from his room, he shrieked with glee at the letters and ran to find them without so much as an explanation from me. He grabbed my hand and we galloped around tapping vowels and consonants. He rushed to our home office to invite my husband on our hunt, unable to contain his joy. 

The work is also in allowing silence. Leaving my phone on the charger even after my kids go to bed. Taking my feelings of hurt, of being left out, to God or my husband or my journal, instead of mindless scrolling. In continuing to ask what He is teaching me even when the answer doesn’t seem clear or isn’t what I want to hear. 

I pray for strength to put down the phone, to stop nursing my nostalgia, and practice settling in to the magic of this season. To pay attention to sweet nursing sessions and silly scavenger hunts. 

To find more ways to daily live the dream instead of missing it. 

***

This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series "Together, Apart".