The Chaotic Loneliness of Parenting

It's a bit of a paradox, really

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Chaotic. LOUD. Lonely?

These three words shouldn’t go together. If something or someplace is chaotic and loud, by definition, it has to be filled with life, with movement, with energy.

And loneliness is supposed to be the absence of all that. It’s silent rooms with the shades drawn, dinner for one, talking to yourself just to hear the sound of a voice.

But this stage of parenting I’m in right now—my three children are in elementary and early middle school—is all these things combined.

Chaotic. LOUD. Lonely.

Of course, everyone’s experience is different, and my particular mixture of seemingly incongruous characteristics is perhaps largely attributable to my personality, my location, and how I do parenting.

First, I’m socially anxious and introverted so I never seek out friends. For example, my children have been playing with the same group of children in the neighborhood for at least three years now and I just exchanged phone numbers with one of the friend’s parents a few months ago. I know all the kids around here very well but I know next to nothing about their parents.

Which brings me to location.

My neighborhood seems to be populated with parents who follow a somewhat late-twentieth-century parenting philosophy. I’m not sure if it’s “free range” exactly, but it’s at least free range adjacent. As far as I can tell, children in the neighborhood play together and the parents do not interact.

It’s honestly kind of ideal for me since I’m much more comfortable around kids than adults, but it takes some getting used to. I’ve studied this dynamic closely for years, always on the lookout for personal slights directed toward me, but I’ve ultimately landed on the conclusion that all the parents have their own things going on, and interacting with neighborhood people is simply not on their agenda.

And finally, there’s the issue of how I do parenting.

I’ve softened over the years, letting loose of the reins little by little, but I remain more vigilant than many parents I know.

For me, parenting is pretty all-consuming. Saying that feels a bit weird because I’m not a PTA super parent, I don’t volunteer at the schools much (tried that… too much anxiety), and my kids don’t do a lot of activities outside of the home. I mostly do the basics of parenting but I do them in a more hands-on way than some parents in my orbit do. That means when my kids have their friends over and they ask me to bounce them on the trampoline* or play pickleball with them in the driveway or throw the football to them so they can play a game called Moss**, I almost always say yes.

Most afternoons after school, there are between one and seven additional children in or around my house. They play inside and outside, and if underside existed, they would play there, too. There is constant noise and movement. Slamming doors, trampoline springs squeaking, balls thudding against the concrete, screams, laughter, arguments, chalk scratching on a chalkboard in a makeshift classroom in my living room because, for some reason, children love recreating school at home right when they get home from school.

I spend the afternoon hours frantically closing doors to keep the bunnies from escaping, filling countless water cups, soaring into the air on the trampoline as children scream around me, playing cards, throwing footballs, setting up a pickleball court on the driveway so the kids can say “Hey, look at us! We’re retired and playing pickleball,”*** and taking math tests created by my daughter and her friends (yesterday’s had about 50 questions that were all like 97 x 97… it took me forever).

It’s loud, it’s chaotic, it’s exhausting, and I freaking LOVE IT.

It is one hundred percent my favorite part of the day. It’s when I feel the most alive. It’s when I have the fewest doubts.

It’s also extremely lonely.

When parenting is your main deal, I guess it’s to be expected that loneliness creeps in when your kids are at school. That makes sense. You have a little person or people with you all the time for years, so when suddenly they’re gone for several hours a day, you can’t help but feel the absence. However, I didn’t anticipate how lonely parenting can be even when your kids are with you. I’ve felt this for many years (I mean, spending all day alone with a baby is a famously isolating experience), but for me, it feels like it’s become more noticeable as the kids have gotten older and less dependent.

I’m fortunate that my wife is doing well in her career (apparently AI hasn’t replaced nurses… yet) so my freelance writing work taking a nosedive is not as financially devastating as it could be. But, I do feel the loss in other ways. Lately, it feels like I don’t have a thing other than parenting. I mean, I have this, whatever this is… creative writing, newsletters, etc. I have a novel coming out. I still edit a parenting humor publication.

It seems like plenty when I type it all out, but all of it feels auxiliary except for the parenting. Like, the rest is just filler. The extra paper and packing material stuffed into a box to fill the space around the real item.

I do what I can to fill the space and time I spend alone, but when my kids return… and the neighborhood descends… it’s surprising that it still feels lonely.

Those two or three glorious afternoon hours before the day dissolves into dinner prep, homework (ugh), and bedtime routines feel lonely, I think, because I’m the only adult present. I’m the outlier. The interloper. In some ways, I’m a prop rather than a person. I’m most valuable for the services I can provide: entertainment, food and water, two-digit multiplication.

But that’s not the only reason.

Sometimes when I’m bouncing on the trampoline for what seems like the fiftieth time in the day, when the sun drops low and the air feels cool, I become untethered. The laughter and screams drift away on the breeze. The sound of the screeching springs recedes. It feels like it’s just me.

Alone.

I begin to think about what it will be like when all these children careening around me are grown up, gone. When the trampoline is rusted away by the Florida humidity. When it’s quiet. Always quiet.

A different type of loneliness begins to creep in. Future loneliness. Because it’s practically impossible for me to exist in the moment. My brain always looks forward. Always. Constantly thinking about tomorrow is almost as exhausting as bouncing for ten straight minutes on the trampoline or doing a set of twenty child tosses onto the giant beanbag chair.

But then, when I’m on the precipice of spiraling too deep inside myself, a tiny flailing fist or foot or forehead connects with some part of my body, knocking me squarely back into the present. Into this moment. The only one that exists right now.

I realize this type of loneliness isn’t so bad—this chaotic and loud loneliness. I’ll take it. I’ll hold onto it.

Future loneliness can wait.

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* Fun fact about this game called “Moss.” My kids and their friends have played it for years at my house. I assume they learned it at school. Basically, one person throws the football and everyone else gathers in a crowd and tries to catch it. Whoever catches it becomes the thrower and the game continues in that manner. I could never understand what the name of the game was, it always did sound like they were saying “Moss,” but that meant nothing to me. Until one day it clicked: Moss… as in Randy Moss the famous wide receiver from the late 1990s and early 2000s known for outjumping defenders to make spectacular contested catches. Brilliant name for a game, but I do wonder how many children playing it have any clue what it means.

** If my insurance company is reading this, I don’t have a trampoline. The trampoline is a… uh… metaphor. Yes, definitely a metaphor. Think about it.

*** Believe it or not, this is a real quote either by my 9-year-old or one of the neighbor girls. I can’t remember who said it.

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Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately:

• I’ve been reading the novel Babel by R.F. Kuang for a few weeks now. It’s fairly dense (there are footnotes and stuff) and long but I am enjoying it. I think the genre is speculative fiction because it’s about people doing a kind of subtle magic with silver working at Oxford, which is not typically my thing, but it is very well done. It’s set in the eighteen hundreds but I often almost forget that which I think is kind of neat. Maybe it’s just me as a reader, but I often feel like it could be taking place in the present day or any period, and then she drops in a line about them using lamps or something, and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, they don’t have cellphones or electricity.” I like that it kind of exists in its own time.

• My friend and co-editor Lindsay Hameroff’s rom-com novel Till There Was You came out on February 20 and you should definitely check it out. It’s funny, sweet, and just extremely well-written.

• I’m back on my HelloFresh kick again and I’m liking it. One of the neighbor girls saw me cooking one afternoon and said, “They give you ALL the ingredients to make that??” I nodded knowingly. “Yes, that’s the beauty of it.”