The Lonely Weeks

Tony and the Bobbles have been in California for three weeks. I could have been blogging all this time, I suppose, but it would probably have been three weeks worth of this, so it’s probably better that I didn’t. How’s it been going? Yeah. Not really that well.

I love my children, and have had momentary stabs of missing them, but I’ve been perfectly fine chatting with them a few times and getting regular reports that they are happy and greatly enjoying their stay. If it makes me a bad mother that I don’t miss them too terribly much, then I am a bad mother.

The way I feel about Tony being gone is completely different. It’s a persistent ache that never goes away. It’s a dark room I can see out of the corner of my eye all the time, and have to constantly talk myself out of going into and banging the walls and screaming.

I could say that I didn’t really think it would be this bad, but I’d be lying. I knew it would, because we did this last year too. I hate not being with him. I hate not running my hands through his hair, and not kissing him goodbye in the mornings, and not talking to him for hours about nothing at all. Most of all, I hate not sleeping with him. And by sleeping with him, I mean sleeping with him. I hate not doing other things in bed with him too, but it’s literally the sleeping that unhinges me.

I’m used to eight hours of sleeping snuggled up to him every single night. Not doing that is kind of like deciding I don’t need to breathe or eat this week. When I get in bed, I can feel every atom of my body asking me where he is and yearning to reach out to him. I have my 12-foot body pillow, five other assorted pillows, and the shirt he wore the day before he left all piled around me, but it doesn’t really help. Every night I sleep a little less, and lie in bed awake, wanting him, a little longer.

It’s not that I sit at home all day just missing him. I go to work every day, and several hours of church functions on the weekends.  I have a new gig editing a great book. I’ve been to more dinners and activities with friends in these few weeks than I normally go to in months. But it’s been rough.

I’ve tried some coping mechanisms. Mostly I’ve done the same coping mechanisms over and over and over:

• Trolled Goodreads for dozens of quotes on love and loneliness and posted them daily on my Facebook wall.
• Let the house get messy.
• Read melodramatic YA novels.
• Cleaned the house.
• Listened to Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up” dozens of times. In a row.
• Made cookies.
• Watched 59 episodes of Doctor Who. Yes, 59. So far.

And yeah, the Doctor Who thing is kind of becoming an obsession. Because this abandoned-by-my-lover situation makes me revert to a teenage emotional state. And a teenage emotional state and spending my nights all alone with David Tennant . . . well you can guess where that leads.