School Days

Today marks the end of the Babe's first "week" (only yesterday and today) of honest to goodness preschool attendance. (I'm not counting the two practice days before Christmas, for no good reason other than that I think of them as practice days--in fact, there was no practical difference between those days and these, but this kind of arbitrary and irrational distinction is a mother's prerogative.)

I have been worrying about how I will use the seemingly endless daytime hours without a Babe to care for, while also knowing that each day will disappear so quickly that I'll barely see the minutes evaporating in front of me. Yesterday, after a relatively trauma-free drop off, I went out for coffee with a fellow school parent and friend, then sat in the coffee shop working, ran some errands, worked some more and picked up the kids. The day, indeed flew by, and I was exhausted when I got them home around 4.

Today, I took the children to school (where the Babe had to be pried, crying, from my arms and carried into her classroom,) the H to the train station for a quick trip to the City for work (interviews for his Independent Spirit Award nomination.) then ran more errands (where do all these errands come from, anyway?) and lunched with a friend before racing back to Lenox to pick up the kids again.

Now I've left Vous in charge of the kids, who are rebelling against my absence and intermittently intruding to whine, cry, cajole and stomp about my meanness, lack of love for them, and general failure to keep my work from intruding into their need for me. All this to say--the work and the errands and the Things That Must Get Done will, I fear, always expand like Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade balloons to fill every available cubic millimeter of space, and I have only my own self to carve out of these every-inflating responsibilities the room to move, create or be still.