I am sitting in the courtyard of the Smithsonian after just perusing the National Portrait Gallery. In what, my friend derisively commented, is a need to justify any time away from my children - I offered to drive her to DC for a job interview.

Now granted, she is in town from Seattle and only had a few days to visit with us, so the drive time is, in itself, some BFF QT.

I thought a half day off, a few hours to wander alone in DC, might be a welcomed respite from my normal daily bubble of burgeoning three year olds… and it is. Just the act of finding something to wear that was a step up from playground, a step back to how I used to dress… was an adventure. Driving without reaching behind me to fulfill snack requests, offered an intellectual freedom I don’t often enjoy.

We had lunch when we got here and I walked her to the Hotel Monaco for her meeting. Then, I just started walking. I walked around blocks, up to the sculpture garden, the mall, over past the spy museum… I just took in the pace of an adult walking alone on a city sidewalk, so light, so carelessly relaxing.

Shall I stop in for a cup of coffee? Settle down at a table and read for awhile? And here is the living reminder of what you cannot ever entirely explain to someone who is not a parent, without being somehow misunderstood. It may sound as though you resent the imposition of parenthood, if you luxuriate in momentary unrestraint. But even as I sit, so in the now, so loose and easy and all grown up, I miss them. I wonder what they are doing; I envy the people who are with them at this moment. The fact that I just wrote this, sitting alone and uninterrupted, is such an unusual leap out of my day to day.

And the taste of it reminds me that I will have more and more time, to myself, as they grow older and become more independent, and the pangs I feel when I think of the hours I am missing this evening whisper of how short it all is, and of how quickly it goes by, as repetitive as that is to say here, there is truth in the platitude.