the importance of "Amy time"

S. and I have been dating for almost three months now, and this relationship is completely changing the way I perceive time. Before, when I was alone, I had so much free time, but it wasn't really free time because I used it to work or to clean or to blog or to read or to bake apple pies. Now my free time is simply not as free. This is not at all a complaint, I promise.

I've been alone for SO LONG that having someone to do things with is simply wonderful. Knowing I can count on him for just about anything is deeply comforting. And one of the best things about him is that he UNDERSTANDS my need for alone time. I need A LOT of alone time, or what we've taken to calling "Amy time." Much of the time that I spend without him is devoted to schoolwork: grading or reading or grading or writing. But then there's time that I spend without him--like tonight, probably--when neither of us is actually busy with anything, that I'll spend doing random things that I used to do before we met.

A couple weeks ago, I was talking to Keita on the phone, and I was marvelling at JUST HOW MUCH writing I'd assigned my students this semester. Her response: "You planned the course as a single person. You had more time then."

Indeed. Not, of course, that it's all that simple. The dangers of making these claims do not escape me. To claim that I have less time than a single person is to claim, then, that single people have more time to work and so should be given more responsibility. Trust me, I know this and actively resist it.

All of this is to say that I'm realizing how much alone time it takes to keep me sane, and to wonder--not at all in jest and not the least bit sarcastically--how people with children manage academic life. I'm so grateful that I recognize how much I need to be happy and how little it would take to make me come untied, undone, to make me break down. A couple times this semester, I felt very much on the verge.

I wrote, in the beginning of an essay about my childhood, that my mother is the kind of person who probably should never have had children. I, too, am a version of that kind of person.

But I think I can be happy with someone who respects my need for lots of alone time. And S., he's so damn good that way. We've imagined our future home with a sound-proof room for me so I can have Amy time without hearing the sportscasters for the football games he'll surely be watching in the living room. That I can live with.