The dictionary has a few definitions of the word “hermit.”  I’m not going with the one in my title, or the Ornithological one.  I’m going with the one that applies to people who have grown tired of sharing their space with assholes and want to live the rest of their lives alone—or with a few chosen others—under the guise of religious devotion or not.

After the birth of my third child, I retreated into a very hermit-like existence.  I had an infant to tend to and I pretty much hated the living guts of most of the adults I was around day-to-day.  It was easy and forgivable for me to say, Eh, I think I’ll just putter around the house with the baby today and if I feel the need to go out, we’ll take a walk through the park or drive up to the Target around the corner for a few things.  Then I was hit with a series of non-devastating but very inconvenient health problems, followed by a couple of minor surgeries that took a long time to heal.  So, my reclusive behavior was again reinforced by my limited mobility.  I just couldn’t get out and about.  People understood, gave me their sympathy, went on with their bustling, chatty little lives and left me alone. 

But, I healed and the baby grew and over the past couple of years, I’ve found myself slipping into a more visible and socially intense lifestyle and I don’t like it. 

The way I’ve been able to measure this is the frequency of make-up wearing occasions.  Three years ago, I only wore make-up when my appearance would be noted—like when I ran the weekly book club at my son’s school, or when I had a parent-teacher conference, or if we were going to a group picnic for scouts or something.  I never wore make-up to run errands because I rarely bumped into people who knew me.  I’d see people that I recognized, but my status was so low that they didn’t know who I was.  I had become invisible, and I liked it.  Back then, I wore make-up once or twice a week, tops.  Now, I have make-up wearing events every day—sometimes multiple times in a day, and it’s rare for me to go anywhere and not run into several people who recognize me.  At one level, I enjoy the illusion of popularity, but on another level, I am annoyed by the need to check myself in the mirror every single time I leave the house.  All this visibility and running of my mouth is wearing me down.  There are days when I become nauseated by the sound of my own voice reverberating in my head.  I need to put an end to it.  Yesterday, I made a vow to myself to make some real efforts to get back to the quiet hermit I used to be.  I can see where I made wrong turns over the past months, and I have come up with a plan to make sure they don’t happen again.

The baby is a pre-schooler now.  She’s at an age where being around other kids is developmentally good for her.  That’s fine, but I don’t want to be around those other kids’ parents, necessarily.  I’m not one to bond with other women at the gym classes, or find that I have oodles in common with a chick at the pre-school.  It just doesn’t happen to me.  More often than not, I suffer through those encounters knowing that I plan to run home and bash the conversations I overheard in my blog or an essay or a piece of short fiction.  I see these situations as story fodder and that’s what helps to get me through them.   I could be altruistic and see them as a sacrifice I make for the wee one, because she needs exposure to these other little shits so in thirty years she can choose a life of solitude for herself.  When I’m not feeling catty and put out, I do that.  I wrap myself in the “I’m such a good mommy” blanket and actively ignore the nitwits around me with their banal dialogue.  But, that often makes its way into some piece of writing, too.  

My middle child is in a very high-profile position in the community for another ten months.  That sounds so ridiculously pompous and asinine as I read that over that it makes me cringe.  But trust me, I’ve tried to re-word it and that’s the best I’ve come up with.   I like watching my daughter as she goes about her assigned duties.  I get a bang out of it, actually.  But, there’s mingling involved… that means showering and doing my hair, putting on make-up and unstained clothes, and then standing around making small talk.  Once in a while, that’s OK, but in heavy frequency it becomes draining on me.  Not that any of these people are bad or irritating in themselves, it’s just the size of the whole thing is so overwhelming.  So many people, over such a long period of time, doing so very much.  It makes me appreciate being married to a person who is willing and able to take on a chunk of it for me.

Those are my two biggest obstacles in achieving hermithood.  The little one needs to interact with like-sized humans and we’ve made promises with the middle one.  So, it’ll be a gradual re-entry to reclusivity, as those obligations are met or change.  Once the little one is in grade school, I can truly commit myself to this goal.  Until then, I have to jump on opportunities to avoid people as they arise.

I don’t hate everyone.  I find young people particularly entertaining.  There are the teens in that program my daughter is involved with that are great to talk to, and some of their parents are quite witty.  Then there are some “kids” at the taekwondo school that I simply adore.  I put “kids” in quotes because it seems my preferable age range is from about 8 to mid-twenties.  See, the older I get, the older “kids” get, too.  It’s entirely conceivable that when I’m seventy, I’ll find the “kids” in their 30’s and 40’s to be perfectly endearing.  Right now, that happens not too much.  There is a definite correlation between kids I like and their parents though.  I’ve found that if I like the kid, I’ll often like their parents, but it doesn’t always go the other way.

Maybe I like these kids because my own social skills are retarded and I’m actually developmentally seventeen when it comes to conversing.  Or, maybe it’s just the freshness of their language and ideas.  I find that even the most awkward verbal exchanges with one of these kids to be more interesting than a smooth one with the mom of another pre-schooler, where we cover the same old stagnant topics using the same old tired vocabulary, silently judging each other through it all.   So, I’ll hang onto the kids.  I’ll continue leave my split-level, suburban hermitage to go mingle with them and their parents because it’s fun.  And, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing at the schools because I like being involved in the kids’ lives in that way.  So, it seems that my options for being a recluse are quite limited.  

It just all needs to be taken down.  I’d like to put things in slow motion and reduce the volume and brightness a few degrees.  Maybe I don’t need to hide from everyone and everything, I just need to take a break from it to catch my breath.  Maybe a hermit vacation would hit the spot.  Or maybe a quiet weekend with the phone off, a good book, a cup of tea and a plate of spiced cookies made with molasses, raisins and nuts.  

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