But many people have unfettered access to my calendar. The result is a near permanent state of churn, in which any given time slot has a Plan A ("have to"), a Plan B ("should do") and a Plan C ("if you can find the time").

Yes, the years of needing to get up at 5:30 a.m. if I wanted an hour to myself in a silent house before the cacophony of rousting kids out of bed and hustling them into clothes, making lunches, brushing hair, signing permission slips and scrounging up a $10 bill ("because the teacher said she can't make change") for a just-now-mentioned field trip all before 8 a.m. are long gone. My oldest children, who came home during lockdown, have been out of the house for at least a year, and at 17, my youngest is remarkably self-sufficient, and almost completely silent, as she prepares for her school day (the permission slips do still randomly appear).

Likewise, the evening battles over homework — making sure it's being done, responding to emergency demands for help — are (mostly) distant memories. I'm more likely to tell my youngest that she needs to stop studying and go to bed than anything else.

But if the minute-by-minute nature of clear-and-present motherhood has eased, there are still dinners to be made; laundry and dishes to be done; appointments to be scheduled and kept; crises to be handled; practices, rehearsals, parties and part-time jobs to drive to; basketball games and performances to attend.

All accompanied by the underlying beat of urgent requests for random information: When did my side of the family come over from Ireland? How do postage stamps work? Why don't we have any good snacks? What is the Hulu password again? Where is my [insert personal belonging here]?

With no one to ask me if her basketball uniform is in the wash or what time of day she was born "for a school project," would I even exist?

Yes, yes I would. And with great abandon.

Like every good Type A mother with a bit of time on her hands, I had planned to use my three family-free days to get some projects done: Rearrange the linen closet, clean out the pantry, deal with the disarray recent storms had inflicted on the backyard, organize old photos, sort through the bins my son left behind when he moved to Kansas City more than a year ago, get rid of the myriad sweaters I never wear yet insist on keeping.

I might visit a friend; I would definitely go to the gym, possibly more than once. Maybe I could make a big lasagna and freeze it.

Reader, I did none of those things. Indeed, my family-free holiday was defined almost entirely by what I did not do, which was pretty much anything at all.

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