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Posted December 24, 2008

Last weekend, Molly went to New York to see a friend, taking Larkin along. They drove away at 4 on Saturday, and I didn't see them again until Sunday night at 10, when I carried Larkin, asleep and clinging to my neck, back up to her room.

Thirty hours of freedom, all for me. The time stretched out in front of me like an enormous cake. Where to bite first?

Biology teaches us that the freed parent will hurtle toward whatever he or she feels most deprived of. Within 10 minutes of Molly and Larkin's exit, I was scanning the local movie listings. Movies are a near-universal casualty of early parenthood, since the added cost of a sitter pushes an already pricy ticket over the edge. Bundling my pleasures together, I decided to stop first at a Laotian restaurant I hadn't been to for ages -- Larkin having not yet developed a taste for larb kai or, for that matter, any restaurant not peopled by mobs of screaming kids.

And so at 5 p.m., when normally I'd be helping with the pesky task of getting Larkin to eat, there I was, sprawled in a booth at the East-West Grille, dining on fried dumplings, drinking beer, and reading my way through The New Yorker. From there it was a short hop to the theater and Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond movie. By now I felt Bond-like myself, unattached and dangerous, with no mission other than to relax and enjoy myself -- a Dad, licensed to chill.

Back home, the house was still a mess from the helter-skelter of Molly and Larkin's rushed departure. Who cared? I ensconced myself in the recliner, put on a football game, and plowed through a stack of old New York Times, catching up on Business sections, even Science and Automotive -- all these compartments of the living, breathing world that I hadn't dipped into in months. Finally I went to bed, and slept eight hours solid, no wake-ups, no plaintive little girl in the night. Then it was up and out for a full-morning spree at the gym: two hours of basketball, Meet the Press from atop the exercise bike, a luxurious dip in the whirlpool.

I know, my weekend was a parody of maleness. But so what? It wasmy weekend! I was having a blast. Throughout, I kept experiencing a time-travel sensation, a strange sort of déjà vu. Finally I realized: The weekend felt like the old me; like life as I had known it for roughly 94 percent of my time on earth so far.

I'm currently writing a book about late-onset fatherhood, and the section I'm working on covers the years in Molly's and my marriage before Larkin was born. As I write about that time in our life together, I'll find myself committing a curious mental slip. Recounting, say, an anniversary trip we took in 2003, I'll instinctively ask myself, But what did we do with Larkin that day?

Of course, there was no Larkin that day; and we did what we always did before she existed. We lived our life.

It's strangely easy to forget that. There's a breathtaking audacity to the way parenthood takes over your life -- laying claim not only to the present and future, but even to your past, as if to establish dominion there retroactively and convince you there really was no life before kids.

The joys of becoming a father have been countless, and I wouldn't have things any other way. But I'd like to be able to remember what that other way was like. What it was like to live unencumbered, selfishly and with few responsibilities. What it was like to have time -- piles of time, scads of it, oodles.

On Sunday night, my girls came back. Molly wore the beleaguered smile of someone who had tried to have a good time with friends while taking care of a toddler. She had succeeded, but it hadn't been relaxing. Getting lost on the wrong highway over Brooklyn, with Larkin shouting "Are we lost, Mama?" doesn't exactly soothe the nerves.

As for me, I felt great. You gotta try this, I told her. Let me take the girl somewhere for a weekend. Molly has a full-time-working-mom's reluctance to spend a weekend away from her child. But still. It doesn't even have to be a whole weekend. Just a day and a little more will do the trick. Thirty hours and a license to chill: It might just be the best Christmas present you can give your spouse this year.