A Memoir of 4pm at my House
when I'm alone with my kids
The dinner inner monologue. Do I make something more elaborate. 4pm is probably too late to start. It’s something that involves chopping multiple vegetables, watching and stirring something on the stove. O (1.5 yo) will probably be crying for me to pick her up intermittently, between three minute intervals where she will play on her own, locked out of D’s (5 yo) room by a baby gate so he can play with his legos. (People say it’s lego but I refuse to write it correctly, there most certainly are not one of them. It deserves an s.) Or he is playing in the living room trying to do his sing time and she is getting on the couch and he is knocking her off or taking something from her. Or she is bopping him with a small toy or grabbing his hair with a gleeful look on her face while he cries out, overly dramatically to get my attention, to finally be the one who is sympathized with.
I will precariously piece together the dinner in between and while holding O either to keep her away from D or to keep her from crying and holding onto my leg while I try to deal with stuff on a hot stove above her without spilling anything on her. If I am successful at making the dinner I still need to cut up oranges, fold cheese into tortillas, blow off the lentil thing I made for O who will still maybe eat it, but also get her blackberry yogurt like D has because she wants what everyone is eating. She might have a few bites of the thing I made for myself, Kyle is having his own ground turkey and rice. I spend an hour making a thing only I will eat and then arranging plates for these two children.
We will spend approximately five minutes at the table together eating before one of them wants to get up and or I need to get up to get a towel to clean up a spill or get someone water or get someone more orange slices or get myself salt. After the five minutes they will get back to fighting in the living room or O will be crying at the baby gate watching D make his legos. I will be washing dishes, trying to get them in the dishwasher before O comes over to take them all out and I will make a pile of sharp knives and peelers etc to put in right before I close it so she won’t get them and cut herself. I will maybe - if it is a very special night - sweep the floor, futilely trying to make it where my socks don’t get crumbs stuck to them and then I feel like my old feet have weirder tendon crunchy things going on. Certainly one of the kids will step in the crumb pile or take the dust pan somewhere else in the house the moment before I need it. Then I will spend 5-6pm arranging toothpaste on toothbrushes, heating up a bottle of milk for O, putting 38 toys in their various homes, picking up 16 snack plates and or retired cups of water and or oat milk and returning them to the sink. putting clothes in the dirty bin, picking up O or intervening on a conflict 42 times in between any of these tasks.
Occasionally I will choose to get take out (once a week, we are trying for) instead, but it has to be from places that are open continuously from lunch through dinner because we need to eat at 4:30/5 to be ready for bedtime. I will order it hopefully soon enough to not have a hunger meltdown (somehow even the act of ordering food on my phone is hard to get through at this hour of the day), and it needs to be with something D will eat if I want to avoid making three different plates again. Which limits us to two different places. A burmese place where we can order him platha and sesame chicken or ethiopian sambusas.
I will choose to get take out so that I can try to read a book. If I try to read a book my children have a magnet that gets activated when I sit down and they are required to be within one to two feet of my body at all times, preferably both on me at the same time. I have been calling it study hall, to give a name to a time I want to invent (which tbh only exists in my fantasy life, or the future, and when it does arrive I will probably be sad, thus is the double bind that is parenting psychology!) where each of us plays and does our own thing together in the same room, thereby having it feel like a rest / chill of some kind. D is on board with this mostly, he will interrupt every minute or two to show me something but he is interested in making things on his own at this point. O on the other hand only wants to play with exactly what D is playing with but she has no interest in building, only destroying. So study hall lasts about three minutes before she is getting into something he working on and he is crying and I have to hold her, which means my part of the study hall has ended.
All of these things I’m describing are, from one perspective - a perspective I can usually find easily at 7:30am by myself after my matcha - beautiful. They are the conditions of my family life, the circumstances of our particular present. When my spanish teacher tells me he loves flying because he can listen to books and podcasts and think, I remember that my fantasy is to fly somewhere first class alone. Preferably overnight. Not even the trip itself, just the flight. Which is indicative of the sustained nature of caregiver life, how it pulls my attention from here to there and back so often that my fantasy is to be trapped in a plane by myself going somewhere for a long time, being unable to help anyone below for any reason.
None of the things I am describing are bad. They aren’t dramatic or really a big deal. And so often they are beautiful, imbued with meaning. give my life such richness. But I’ve felt such looming despair at this time, envy of anyone who is somehow able to avoid this time. The conditions that could help me gain perspective are the exact thing I can’t access which is what makes it hard! Remembering it’s not that hard! Remembering we have what we need. The emotional waves of D, how he can be so overwhelmed, so screaming, so continuously unable to restrain himself in trying to hit, or scream, etc. And how I know we need to leave the house to get out of it but I cannot bring myself to. Or I cannot think of a way to shift what I know needs to be shifted.
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Let’s devote this May parenting circle to contemplating our 4pm times with our families. Maybe it’s 4pm for you, maybe it’s another time or circumstance. But a time that feels repeatedly challenging, and let’s look into it with love and contemplation. Let’s see what happens to it when we do that! At the very least for solidarity’s sake. At best perhaps a new idea of a plan? Nothing too ambitious of course, being together, and feeling the support of that as the main goal.
It’s May 17, Friday, 10:30am-12pm pst (note the time change if you’ve been coming before, had to do it cause our family schedules are shifting all around).
Send me your 4pm memoir also, if you want! I want to read all about it. For reals.
Love,
Sarah