Conferencing

Keith is gone to a conference for several days. This is good.

If you have a job that doesn't involve conferences, you should invent them. Not for the conferences themselves, mind you--it's astonishing how little of professional value actually occurs at the things. Other than getting to go out and have expensive food and drink lots and lots of alcohol in the company of people with similar interests or at least similar working lives. I suppose there's some value there, tho' I doubt it's really all that "professional."

But I'm thinking about the personal and familial benefits of conference-going. I'm thinking about the absolute bliss when you enter the hotel room and shut the door. And it's clean. And you are alone and you can watch any sort of tv any time you want and you can sleep in and there will be no crying child or grumpy spouse or kitchen full of dirty dishes to punish you afterwards. And you can stay out as late as you want and organize your schedule (apart from a conference duty here or there) as you want, and you can eat what and when and if you want (I suppose there are people to whom the "if" applies. . . ) . And it's all good. It restores your soul.

And meanwhile back at home--umm, that depends. When the boys were little, Keith seemed to view my conference absences as things to be endured. He'd go into boot camp mode, with a strict schedule and a checklist. I, however, I had a rather different approach. . .

Which is to say, the boys loved it when Keith left for a few days and, yes, so did I. It wasn't a matter of Keith, per se. I remember reading an article by a recently widowed woman with three young kids, and in this piece she noted, "It's amazing what counts as 'dinner' when you're the only grown-up around." That's it. Not just the dinners, tho' certainly those--we'd go out for at least one meal and for all the others we'd have TV or Movie Nights, with 'dinner' on a big blanket in the living room--but the overall freedom of being the only adult in the household. You can get away with stuff, plus there's no energy-draining resentment and repressed anger because Spouse is watching tv rather than playing with the kids or ignoring the dishes or leaving little beard hairs all over the bathroom sink. You're on your own.

So Keith would depart and the boys would immediately shift into my bed and we'd have tickly, giggly mornings, and there'd be bound to be baking of some sort, and probably a visit to the really good, really big, faraway park, the one with the stream and the great overhanging tree. I truly didn't set out to teach the boys to associate "Dad's absence" with "fun," tho' looking back, I realize that was what happened, and that was Not A Good Thing. It all comes down to Calvinist guilt, actually. I feel guilty all the time: I'm not a good enough wife, mother, neighbor, scholar, teacher, daughter, friend, etc. etc. etc. So take away the obligation to be a Good Wife for a few days, and well, I do believe the word is liberation. And what do you do when you're liberated from ordinary obligations, from the usual routine? You celebrate. You party. You go on holiday. Hence the Movie Nights and the giggly mornings and the park outings.

But of course all of it depended on the fact--the absolute, never-doubted fact--that Keith would soon be home. Because the liberation rested utterly on the temporary nature of the whole thing. I was like one of those pretend hippies at Woodstock, the college students who jumped around in their fringe vests and tie-dyed tee-shirts, and then went back to writing papers and taking exams and beefing up their resume's. Had the situation ever become permanent, freedom would have quickly transformed into anarchy (think broken glass, burning cars, blood on the doorstep, shrieks and wails and the wah-wah-wah of sirens), and the sense of liberation would have become loneliness, total and complete and devastating loneliness.

Just like life alone in a hotel room would be an absolute horror.

But for a few days, once or twice a year, it's a fine and wonderful thing.