The Importance and Contradiction of Alone Time

School’s back, and so is the annual pressure to sign my kids up for everything. I’ve bought in, fully. My older son is resisting hard, and I need to let him win this one, right after I sign him up for swimming, choir, and cross country. Just for the bus ride after school to the park near us, obviously.

Dance is where I’m really stuck.

I put him in dance a couple of years ago because team sports never clicked for him, and because at the beach, a place he claims to hate, he’d break into dance completely unprompted. I decided that meant dance was his happy place. He did well. I loved the year-end concerts. His teacher told me he was a natural.

Now he tells me it’s boring. Same moves, over and over, one more obligation to please people, including me, including the woman who runs the studio. I still want to sign him back up anyway, because if he doesn’t keep at it, how will he ever know what he actually loves? He’ll fall behind. He’ll lose the thing that lit him up at the beach.

That’s the argument running in my head, the one currently badgering my kid into a dance class he’s already told me he hates.

This weekend gave me a clearer look at what’s actually going on.

My hiking trip got rained out. No kids; they were with their dad, no plans, an entire Saturday stretching out empty in front of me. I texted a friend to see if she still wanted to hike in the downpour. No. So I sat on my couch and felt the whole day loom.

I ran to my closet, put on my gear, and drove myself straight to the Grouse Grind. Came home, worked for a while, and when that wore off, I started beating myself up for having no life outside of work and exercise, so I started texting everyone I know. A friend offered to have me over to cook with her.

I hate cooking, always have, despite coming from a family of genuine foodies. When she asked, I realized what I actually wanted was to stay home, alone. She heard that in my voice, laughed, and told me to make a to-do list instead, something to distract myself from the “I’m alone” thoughts.

So I made the list. I’m a very dutiful friend, and as I started writing things down, I felt a small flicker of panic that the list was eating into my alone time. Which was absurd the moment I noticed it. I’d been upset about having alone time in the first place, wanting to fill it, and the second I actually started filling it, I missed the alone time instead.

I went to yoga instead. Then that same friend, the one who years ago introduced herself by randomly offering pizza to strangers walking past her house, invited me over for exactly that: bacon and potato pizza. I said yes. I came home that night, still alone, and it was fine. Completely fine. I went to bed happy and woke up happy.

Which brought me back to my son and his dance class.

Filling up every hour of a kid’s schedule teaches them that being alone, or bored, is a problem to be solved rather than a state worth sitting in. My son is an introvert, and he’s also a rule-follower, which means he does the thing he’s told even when he’s already said he doesn’t want to. I’ve been telling him he’s wrong to want out of dance, while insisting, in the same breath, that all I want for him is his own happiness. Those two things don’t actually fit together.

He needs time that isn’t scheduled toward anything, the same kind of time I finally gave myself this weekend, if he’s ever going to find out on his own what actually lights him up. Not because someone signed him up for it. Because he found it, the way he found the beach dancing nobody asked him to do.