Member-only story
The Meaning of Homecoming Dread-and why it’s not always “me”
Before Covid, I traveled a lot for work. I had been a homeschool mom for 13 years, and was just finishing up my long-awaited undergrad.
I loved my home and my children, like any homeschool mom does. It’s not a desperate kind of love, but it’s solid, enduring, and patient. It has to be, or you would lose your mind on a daily basis.
My then-husband had been in school for 20 years, then had been working as a professor for 6 years at that point. He was not a part of our everyday life for any of those years, and if he was, he did not integrate himself with us. Rather, he would make himself scarce and read, or demand some kind of attention that was not conducive to our agenda for the day.
The energy it took to manage life with him was far greater than the energy it took to manage life without him. I had figured out how to do that almost decades before. It was far easier to be a single mom. My father was the one making our ends meet anyway. How I wish I had seen the writing on the wall at the beginning…
The dread began when I started to travel more. It’s not that he took up any slack at home. He didn’t. He didn’t cook or do laundry. The kids took care of themselves, drove each other to activities and worked their own schedules out. Yes, it was hard on them, but I had a…
