The New Normal

Another Friday night. This used to be my favorite time of the week. School and/or work was over and I could look forward to sharing a pizza as well as a weekend with my family. Now that the kids are moving on, Fridays are still great but they're not quite living up to their former glory.

Take tonight. I'm sitting here in my family room, completely alone, trying to run through a couple of online Italian lessons (Vorrei avere la zuppa del giorno - I'd like the soup of the day to you non-Italians) before coming up with a topic for this blog. The house is dark; my husband is watching some nature or history channel on the non-HD TV in the basement and my daughter is up in her room getting cozy with her computer. I know I must be getting old because all I want to do is turn off all the gadgets and blow the dust off the old Scrabble board. There are just some nights when 'Words With Friends' won't cut it.

I guess I shouldn't complain. The son we rarely see did manage to squeeze us into his busy schedule tonight. Never mind that he stayed just long enough to consume a quarter of the extra large pizza we ordered before hustling off to see a movie with his honey. Good thing I'm not proud; I'll dangle free food or just about anything else to entice my kid to pop his old address into his GPS and find his way back over here. For a few minutes we were all together. For a few minutes it felt like old times, hanging around the kitchen on a Friday night with a pizza. For a few minutes I forgot that we're all going in separate directions.

But now that I'm sitting here in a dimly lit, painfully quiet room; with nothing to keep me company but the words pouring on to my computer screen, I remember.