Not counting a constant parade of cats and the occasional sleep-over “guest,” I’d lived alone for forty years. Intentionally. Because I liked it.
In Brooklyn, my kitchen table sat eight, but I never invited anyone for dinner. I also had three couches that were all mine, mine, and mine. The apartment—on the top floor of a run-down walk-up—was almost a mile from the subway, in the wrong part of brownstone Brooklyn. Getting there was, in the parlance of my people, a shlep.
I moved to Queens—a real farshlepteh krenk from the subway and virtually no available street parking—where a smaller kitchen meant a smaller kitchen table and one chair. The seats-eight table became “dining room” table—with no chairs. A second chair begrudgingly made an appearance after much haranguing from my therapist about the not-normalness of my home isolation.
Why do you refuse to buy another chair, my shrink asked repeatedly.
Then there’d be somewhere for someone to sit.”
Exactly, he’d say.
Exactly? There is definitely a point here you are missing.
I lived alone and when I craved company, I went out. I had a lot of people in my life at work, at 12-step meetings, in the neighborhood. Home was, well, mine, mine and mine. Now, a second chair taunted me. It annoyed me—a silent reminder I was alone, and therefore, per my former shrink, not normal.
Before getting grown enough to have a place I could live alone, as an only child growing up in The House of the Angry Marriage (the HAM for short, because I’m sure I’ll refer to it again as time goes on) I’d found my safe places under the bed, behind the big evergreen, in the crawl space in the attic. Outgrowing those, I crawled into a bottle of vodka—one more place I could see you, but you couldn’t see me—and floated there fairly comfortably for twenty years. Drunk in the East Village, someone was always crashing on my couch. Some paid. Or traded drugs. Or sex. Others were just there until they weren’t. I didn’t mind people there when I was drunk because when I was drunk I wasn’t there, even when I was. I was, quite literally, out of my head.
Sober at thirty-three, I turned my apartments—with their lack of seating, or abundance of seating but lack of interest in having guests for dinners/ coffees/ shared-TV-watching—into replacements for a closet, an evergreen tree, vodka. Home was finally my space.
In July 2018, I got a my first sober roommate. My mother.
Cohabitating has been challenging in ways we didn’t foresee. We knew there’d be an adjustment period, but assumed any problems would come during the unpacking of the sixty years of mother/daughter emotional baggage we’d been dragging around and were now trying to fit into a small one bedroom apartment, or maybe from two grown women sharing a single bathroom. That turned out to be the easy stuff.
This hard stuff? She’s an outie and I’m an innie. Big Edie craves people and stimulation all the time, while this Little Edie, as I’ve explained (see above) has a limited capacity for social interaction.
Before moving in, Mom was fairly bedridden, asleep by 8:30 pm most nights. I get home from work at 7:00. In my imagination the aide would go home and me and Big Edie would lay in her bed, bonding, talking and watching TV together until 8:30 when I’d have the rest of the night to myself. To read. Netflix and chill. Write. Do nothing.
The good news: Big Edie has gotten better. She’s gets around more, goes to adult day care part of the week, and rarely gets to bed before 11 pm.
The slightly less good news: Because I wait until she goes to bed to snack, watch TV, do nothing, do anything alone–there is a lot less bed-time in my bedtime. Weekends, when the aides are there, I get creative in the search for alone: I sit in my car in the Costco parking lot watching water, or the garage under my building listening to music. Or silence. Or check my emails or read. Or nothing. I repair and refresh in the only way I know how. Alone.
Being an introvert is a thing these days. Memes abound. In the are you an innie or an outie question, I stand comfortably under the loud, outspoken introvert umbrella—those of us who recharge when no one is around. That’s me. My battery is draining, but while I’m never home alone, I am also never alone at home. The second chair has finally revealed its purpose in my life. It wasn’t taunting me, but simply biding its time until I was ready to have it filled it with someone to love.
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As a dad I know how valuable (and rare) alone time can be! PS your mom looks like a cool lady.
She is, thanks. I’m reading your blog backwards and I love it. But I don’t want to get to the divorce part. I don’t want to see you get your heart broken, but I know it’s coming. 🙁
Hey thanks! It’s ok I’m working through everything, I should probably update the “About” page so it doesn’t sound so gloomy..
Wonderful
Thanks, Linda!
Beautiful writing, Jodi. Thank you. From a sister Innie, with an Outie mother.
Why am I not surprised, Nan? Thanks for reading.
Though I figured u were quite talented, now I know…
Great piece. Perhaps we might search for alone, together some time!
Thanks for sharing.
Yeah. I know you know. ❤️
Oh, you got me at the end. I love it. I love that the universe brings us lessons in all shapes and sizes–and persists. And I love that neither you nor your mom is alone–despite you wishing it might be so. Nobody should be alone right now. The world is too crazy for that . . .
Thanks @candidkay. I shake my head daily, hourly, trying to figure out what bad movie we’re living in right now. Things taking place and people doing things that would be cut from a movie script as too unbelievable. Thanks for reading and checking in