When They Were Gone
by Billie Hinton
She was the mother of two under-three-year-olds, a stay-at-home mom, child psychotherapist, knowledgeable about object constancy, attachment, separation, child development milestones. Every afternoon when she was the one needing a nap, her two non-napping night owls insisted on daily read-aloud time, fighting sleep, begging for one more chapter from the book-in-progress, poking her with tiny but sharp fingers when she nodded off mid-sentence.
Did they never get tired? They seemed to refuel from the air itself. She made sure they understood the game, explained how it worked, asked if they wanted to play hide and seek.
Yes! They shrieked in one loud cry, two young voices ringing with joy. Hide and seek replaced afternoon reading time, a new daily routine.
They always wanted her to be IT - which worked best anyway, because she could count for a very long time. They would call out, are you ready to come find us yet? And she would answer, no, I’m not finished counting.
It can take a good long time to get to 100.
This desperate need for a few minutes of alone time, minutes where no one needed her or wanted her, and all was silent, were for her a potent fuel that saved her as a mom. If she got this time, she could hold on to her developmentally-appropriate parenting skills, by threads, but she could hang on.
She felt guilty some days, stretching out the count to unbelievably long spans of time, while they waited, so breathless and quiet, in places she already knew they were, and she would eventually stretch the game even longer by looking in every ridiculous place there was in the house, where she knew they were not, padding her quiet time, her refueling, thinking that in some bizarre way she was stealing the fuel from them, children still young enough to need that from their mother.
But it’s true, you have to take care of yourself first. Her mother said this, and friends, and while she wasn’t sure it was true in every situation, she accepted it as such.
Another afternoon arrived, her body felt like a sack of something heavy, her eyelids drooped in fatigue, and all she wanted was to curl up on the bed and sleep for an hour, maybe two. By now the children knew what to do. Hide and seek, they cried, while she sat on the sofa and closed her eyes to start the count. We’re ready, they called after she got to 100, but she said I’m still counting! And kept on to 200, and they said Now, mom? And she said not quite yet. Soon, though. And went to 300.
It was quiet in the house, so quiet she could hear the clock ticking in the other room. She thought maybe a miracle had happened, they’d fallen asleep waiting for her to find them. So on this day, instead of dragging it out, she went to the place she knew they’d gone, straight away: the bedroom closet with all the clothing that made a thick curtain behind which they were invisible. She opened the door and waited for the telltale giggle, but the room, the house even, remained as quiet as it had been.
She looked behind the clothing for good measure, but they weren’t there. Haha, she thought, they’re getting more clever at finding good places, and she went to the easy ones quickly, just to be sure, then started room by room, bathrooms, bedrooms, laundry room, the rooms on the periphery of the house, then the obvious places, the dining room and living room. They were nowhere to be found.
The rule of the game was that they could not go outside the house, but she checked the yard anyway. The goldfish pond, the vegetable garden, the garden shed, the secret space behind the shed. The sand pit and tree house. She wiped the sweat from her forehead, expecting them to run out the back door happy to tell her they’d won the game, but birds chirped and the sound of nothing surrounded her.
She went inside and rechecked the house, inch by inch, again and then another time. Her breath becoming shallow, all the lethargy drained away. Bending over to look beneath beds, under furniture, in the kitchen cupboards, the washer and dryer, bending over so many times she felt like a bird pecking frantically, looking for a grain of food that was no longer there.
Billie Hinton lives on a small farm with words, horses and donkeys, cats, Corgis, bees, native plants, and a Golden Retriever who believes in love.