I live alone. These things happen. Your children grow up, your husband leaves, and then you are one. This is a happy story, I promise, but I do need to say this: Get ready. You may be next. And if you are, please, please try to remember what I am telling you now: You know how you never have enough time? You will have it. The very thing, that precious, out-of-reach, shimmering pot of gold you have been longing for. You will even have time on your hands. If you are wise, you will see it as a gift. If you are like me, you will have to do some stumbling around to get there.
Like so much in life, this story is about dinner. Dinner was how I spent almost thirty years of my life—shopping for dinner, making dinner, and eating dinner with my family. Slipping chopped carrots into the meat loaf so that more vegetables would be represented in the meal. Guiding dinner-table conversation so that it held something loftier than burp jokes. And then, after dinner, helping with homework, making sure children went to bed at a relatively decent hour. It was the life I had chosen, and most of the time I loved it. It was domestic. It was cozy. So when this ritual ended, I was totally unprepared for the expanse of time that stretched out in the evenings.
With a few exceptions, I hadn’t spent an evening alone since my twenties. I think that one of the reasons I got married in the first place was because I hated living alone, hated walking home after work past well-lit apartments where families were having what I assumed, longingly, to be their snug and happy evenings. I hated unlocking the door of my apartment, where it was pitch-dark, knowing that I’d be alone until the sun came up.
After I got married and had children, every single evening was accounted for. I loved that. And now, all these years later, I had this huge hole of time in the evenings again, this giant, gaping Grand Canyon of time. Nothing was expected of me. Good Lord, what was I supposed to do?
At first, I couldn’t shake the feeling, hardwired after all those years, that I should be home. The light would fade at dusk, and I’d think, I’m supposed to be home, I’d better get home before dark. I missed my children and wondered what they were having for dinner. They didn’t ever call me to say, “Oh, Mommy, I really miss your dinners.” I wondered, petulantly, why I hadn’t just ordered takeout all those years, and I regretted every judgmental thought I’d had about mothers who’d done exactly that.
But sometimes, when I’d remember I had no reason to go home, I’d go to the movies instead. The freedom of being able to do this, even if it felt strange at first (A movie on a weeknight? Was that allowed?), even if I felt self-conscious buying my solo ticket and sitting in my solo seat, thrilled me, the way I imagine astronauts feel when they’re floating weightlessly in space.
Or I’d take the newspaper (another thing I finally had time for) and go to my favorite neighborhood coffee shop for its excellent turkey burger and coleslaw—again, feeling this freedom from not having to think about, shop for, and prepare a meal. I thought about the hours I’d spent doing these things—two or three hours a day, for decades—and I thought, Boy, that was a lot of hours. I could have read a book, or a thousand.
I realized I had the thing that people, including me, constantly bemoan that they have none of. Having no time, and complaining about it, is the norm. “I’ll call you when I’m out from under,” we tell each other, and then we don’t, because we’re never out from under. I’m not sure why we all think we’re supposed to be too busy, or who started it. Go to Europe and you see people loafing around most of the day.
For many years, when a friend would phone me in the evening and ask, “Do you have a minute?,” I’d think, meanly, No, actually, I don’t. Later tonight I may have a minute, after I finish dinner and getting my children to bed, but I hope to be sleeping by then.
And now I had a minute. I had many minutes, entire evenings of minutes. I started to think of having time not as an oddity, or something to feel strange about, but as a kind of present that had been dropped in my lap. It seemed unbecoming, as my mother would say, to not enjoy the very thing that I’d been longing for all these years. It seemed kind of asinine, in fact.
I made myself call friends I’d promised to call years ago. I think they were surprised to hear from me—“Is everything all right?” one college friend asked. “Did somebody die?”—but they were nice about not reminding me that I’d been out of touch. Some of them had gotten divorced or remarried since I’d seen them, some had had cancer and I felt terrible that I hadn’t known, but not one of them made me feel worse about it. I made dates to meet them for coffee and kept the dates, and I looked at pictures of their now-grown children on their cell phones and showed them pictures of mine. I visited friends who’d had operations and were stuck in bed. Other friends invited me to watch their adult children play in bands in tiny clubs downtown, and I went (loud, but fun). I tried to show up for people.
I tried stretching out time instead of filling it. For many weeks I acted in a play, and after the play I’d walk for a half hour or so before getting on the subway home. I loved those walks—decompressing, thinking about how the show went, feeling the freshness of the air after being in a stuffy theater for hours.
I came to look forward to eating alone. Does that sound like I’m protesting too much? I hope not. But really, it was a surprising relief not to have to keep up dinner-table conversation, to make sure that everyone got asked (and congratulated for!) what they did that day. I made friends with the prepared-food section of my grocery store, an area I’d mostly shunned (“I can make that!”), and I tried out everything in it, even the green salads it would have taken me five minutes to throw together at home.
MADE BY MARIA, say the labels on the carrot-and-mango salad, cranberry chicken salad. I don’t know who Maria is—the deli man says she’s Greek and cooks for several stores—but I love her food, which I usually eat on a tray in bed while watching some detective show. I take a long bath, so long that my fingertips wither, and then I get in bed with my tray, and I send a little telepathic thank-you to Maria, wherever she may be, for making my delicious dinner. Sometimes I call my children, and sometimes they call me, and we catch up. But sometimes it’s just me. That’s fine too.