My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Feeling Guilty About Wanting Alone Time? A Mom’s Story
By Claire, 35 — Minneapolis, MN
I used to feel guilty about wanting alone time. Not hours of it. Not a weekend away. Just three minutes in a parked car outside my kids’ elementary school, engine off, hands still on the wheel, before I turned the key and drove to work. Three minutes where nobody needed me to find a shoe, pack a snack, or answer a question about whether fish have feelings. Three minutes where I was just a person sitting in silence. And for the longest time, I thought that wanting those minutes made me a bad mother.
I’m an accountant. My days are spreadsheets and tax codes. My evenings are homework and bath time and the particular chaos of bedtime with a seven-year-old and a four-year-old who have radically different ideas about when the day should end. My husband works nights, so from five p.m. onward, I’m the whole show. I love my kids with something that scares me sometimes. But there are mornings when I close the car door after drop-off and the silence hits me like warm water, and I don’t want to move.
When Alone Time Feels Like Something to Apologize For
It started as an accident. One Tuesday morning last fall, I was running late — which, if you’re a parent, means I was running exactly on time but felt like I was failing. I got the kids out of the car, watched them disappear through the double doors, and then just sat there. I hadn’t planned to. I think my body decided for me.
The parking lot was emptying out. Other parents were pulling away, already on their phones, already somewhere else. I sat with my hands in my lap and noticed the frost on the windshield starting to melt in uneven patches. I noticed the smell of the coffee I’d poured but hadn’t drunk. I noticed my own breathing.
It lasted maybe two minutes before I started the car and merged into traffic. But something had happened. Something small and warm had opened in my chest, and it stayed with me through the morning like a stone I could turn over in my pocket.
The next day I did it again. This time on purpose. I turned off the radio, leaned back against the headrest, and just breathed. I didn’t meditate — I don’t know how to do that, not really. I didn’t journal or repeat affirmations. I just existed, alone, without anyone’s name on my lips. Three minutes. Then I drove to work.
By the end of the week, I was protecting those minutes the way you protect the last hour of sleep before an alarm goes off. Fiercely and a little desperately.
What I Learned About Needing Solitude as a Parent
Here is the part that’s hard to say out loud: for a long time, my body didn’t feel like mine. It felt like a logistics system. I carried things, I drove things, I prepared things. I stayed up too late folding laundry and woke too early to pack lunches, and somewhere in there my shoulders had crept up around my ears and just stayed. My lower back ached most evenings. My jaw was tight from the kind of clenching you don’t notice until a dentist points out the wear on your molars.
In those three minutes in the parking lot, I started to notice all of it. Not to fix it. Just to feel it. The tiredness in my eyes. The knots below my shoulder blades. The strange relief of uncrossing my arms and letting my hands go soft.
I read somewhere — probably on my phone at two in the morning while my youngest coughed in the other room — that the body stores tension the way a jar stores water: you don’t notice how full it is until something tips. My three minutes were the tipping. Not dramatic. Not a breakdown. Just a slow noticing of everything I’d been carrying without acknowledging.
One night, after the kids were finally asleep, I ran a bath. Not a Pinterest bath with candles and rose petals. A Tuesday bath with the door locked and the fan on so I couldn’t hear the dryer buzzing. I brought the small warming device my friend had given me months earlier — a HiMoment thing she’d wrapped in tissue paper with a note that said for the tension you won’t talk about. I’d shoved it in my nightstand and forgotten about it. But that night I pressed the warm side of it against my neck and just let the heat sit there while the water cooled around me.
I cried a little. Not because I was sad. Because my body remembered it could feel something other than tired.
Learning to Stop Apologizing for Self-Care
I didn’t tell my husband about the parking lot ritual for weeks. When I finally mentioned it — casually, while he was making coffee before his shift — he looked at me like I’d told him I’d been secretly training for a marathon.
“Three minutes?” he said. “That’s your thing?”
I waited for the judgment. For the suggestion that maybe I should try yoga instead, or a real meditation app, or one of those retreats people post about online where you sit in silence for a weekend and come back enlightened.
Instead he said, “I sit in the parking lot at work for ten minutes before I go in. I listen to the same song every time.”
We looked at each other across the kitchen and I realized: we were both doing it. Finding tiny pockets of solitude inside a life we’d built together. Stealing back small pieces of ourselves, not because the life was wrong, but because we’d forgotten to leave room for quiet.
That conversation changed something between us. Not in a dramatic way. In a Tuesday-morning way. We started asking each other, did you get your minutes today? Like it was a nutrient. Like it was something necessary. And I stopped feeling guilty about needing it.
Why Three Minutes Is Enough
I know what people might think. Three minutes is nothing. Three minutes is the length of a pop song, the time it takes to boil an egg, the gap between snooze alarms. What can three minutes possibly do?
I’ll tell you what they did for me. They taught me that solitude doesn’t have to be earned. That you don’t need a spa day or a weekend away to count as someone who takes care of herself. That the space between who you are for other people and who you are alone is not a guilty space. It’s a necessary one.
Some mornings I use those minutes to just look at the trees lining the school parking lot. Some mornings I press my palms against my eyes and let the dark behind my eyelids be the only thing that exists. Some mornings I drink my coffee while it’s still hot, which as any parent knows is a radical act of self-care in itself.
Last week my daughter asked me why I didn’t drive away right after drop-off like the other parents. I thought about making something up — checking emails, waiting for traffic to clear. Instead I told her the truth.
“I sit here for a few minutes because it makes me feel calm,” I said. “And then I’m ready to start my day.”
She thought about this for a moment. Then she said, “Like how I hug my stuffed fox before school?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly like that.”
She nodded, satisfied, and climbed out of the car. I watched her walk through the doors. I leaned back against the headrest. The frost on the windshield was already melting.
Three minutes. Engine off. Hands open. Nobody’s name on my lips.
That’s my highlight time.
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