My Pocket of Solitude

I am sitting inside on a beautiful day.  I am sitting inside when I could be outside on a beautiful day.  I am sitting inside and my kids are at school (probably playing outside), and I could be doing a million different things.  But for right now, I am sitting inside and typing these words and trying to remember how to be this me.
I am a teacher.  I am a teacher and a mother.  I am a teacher and a mother and a wife.  I am a teacher and a mother and a wife and a daughter and a heavily relied on friend.  I am all of these things and sometimes I forget that there was a point in my life when I was maybe just me.  But then, maybe not. I have always been attached to people.  I have been the support for so many people, I can not begin to count them on my fingers.  I have loved that role.  Giving advice and helping people talk through issues has always come easily to me.  I started listening to my mother when I was in middle and high school, and moved onto friends and boyfriends, and I loved, love, that feeling of being needed.  It is my energy.
But right now.  Right now I want to be selfish.  In my small way, I am rebelling against this constant need.  I have small children.  They NEED me.  In that way that no one else in all my years of helping other people, has ever NEEDED me.  They cling and whine and grab and grasp and stomp and hit and push and pull on every fiber of my physical and mental being until I am nothing more than MOMMY!  And most of the time, I love this need.  I love that when they stub a toe or cry in the night, I can solve their ache with a hug and a kiss.  Theirs is a generally easy need to satiate.  But last night it was hard.  Last night I wanted to walk out of my house with my laptop and a book.  Or better yet I wanted to pop in my ear buds and RUN and run and run.  Because last night they would not let me sit.
I used to have a ritual when my school year ended (as it did yesterday).  I would, of course, go to happy hour (whatever time that was for us) with my teacher friends to celebrate one more year's survival.  But the next day, on my first day off, I would go and sit in Barnes and Nobles.  I would collect ten, twenty, sometimes more, books, and pile them in front of me on a table.  I would sit in the cafe with a coffee and the piped in Starbucks music mix of the day, and I would read.  Just the first chapter of each.  I would place the books in piles, making categories, weeding out the uninspired, until I had 5 or 10 to get me through my summer.  It took hours to decide, and I loved every moment.  It was the excitement of knowing my soul would be fed for months with these books, that I could get lost in these new worlds.  Each time I sat down to read one of these books, I fell into a pocket of solitude that I adored.  I never felt the need to share the books except to say "I'm reading...I think you'd like it."  It wasn't about the conversations I could have with others.  It was about the act of being alone, with and inside a book.  Reading is the only alone time I've ever cherished.
But now that I have so little alone time.  That so few of my moments belong to me alone, I am desperate to find those pockets of solitude.  Every part of me is telling me use this time well.  I have to pick up the kids in 20 minutes (oh God, 19 minutes now!) and I should should should clean and launder and figure out dinner and ahhh everything in this house is on the floor and I should have gone for a run earlier and picked up and done and called and written and...well, you get the point.
But no.  I have selfishly carved out these last hours for myself.  I finished a book, lying luxuriously on my couch, listening to children from neighboring yards shout and giggle, and now I am writing.  And in 20 minutes (make it 17 now), I will pick up my children and resume the MOMMY dance.  And it will be easier tonight because I was selfish today.  But is it really selfish if I will be a better Mommy for it?
Perhaps, instead, I'll call it peaceful and leave it at that.