single parenting
My amazing wife has flown the coop for a few days for some conferencing and hopefully some well-deserved R & R away from the monsters for a few days. So it's single parenting time for me. I'm actually pretty good at it, I think, but only because I manage it like a very long run. I know I have to get from here to Sunday night without any really egregious damage to the kids and also some shards of sanity still intact so that she has something to come back to. Knowing this, I can pace myself, focus on breathing, marshal my reserves. I know in advance which parts will be the most taxing (getting everyone out the door in the morning; finding some way to keep everyone amused on Saturday, especially if the heat wave hasn't broken and the outside air is still as foul as it has been for the last couple of days (is it just me or did there used to be the occasional +30C day on which there wasn't so much ozone in the air it felt like you were trying to breath underwater)). I can work out a timetable to make it all look pretty good, get the laundry done, and if things go exceptionally well I may have a nice dinner waiting for my love when she gets home on Sunday. All, of course, with the sole purpose of impressing her enough so that I might get lucky.
I did a more protracted bout of single parenting in the early 1990s when I split with my first wife. Even then it was somewhat artificial because I had a shared custody agreement in which I'd look after my two kids (two! ha! child's play!) for a two week stint and then get two weeks to recover. I well remember those days. There were times when I'd have to take an entire day off of work just to clean the house, wash their clothes, wipe spaghetti off the ceiling. I got sick a lot, too. The stress of living on the edge, both logistically and financially, causes that. On the Friday evenings when my ex-spouse and I did the hand-off, I remember that I'd schlepp home and crawl into bed by 830 pm. Sometimes I'd just pretty much stay there until Monday morning.
So that was the part-time but with no definite endpoint single parenting experience. But most single parents have it much worse than I did then or do now (though I'm not sure how many single parents have six kids....but I'm sure there must be some).....brief interruption there to shoosh one 3 year old back to bed and simultaneously lug about 75 lb of laundry to the basement....it's hard to imagine how you cope with a situation like this that might well go on forever, especially when you're not as lucky as I was in terms of having an understanding workplace (though, understanding as they were, I came within a hair of losing my career at tenure review time).
Being a parent is the hardest job in the world. Doing it by yourself, well, just unbelievable. I was a tourist. Hats off to the residents.
And now to laundry land.
I did a more protracted bout of single parenting in the early 1990s when I split with my first wife. Even then it was somewhat artificial because I had a shared custody agreement in which I'd look after my two kids (two! ha! child's play!) for a two week stint and then get two weeks to recover. I well remember those days. There were times when I'd have to take an entire day off of work just to clean the house, wash their clothes, wipe spaghetti off the ceiling. I got sick a lot, too. The stress of living on the edge, both logistically and financially, causes that. On the Friday evenings when my ex-spouse and I did the hand-off, I remember that I'd schlepp home and crawl into bed by 830 pm. Sometimes I'd just pretty much stay there until Monday morning.
So that was the part-time but with no definite endpoint single parenting experience. But most single parents have it much worse than I did then or do now (though I'm not sure how many single parents have six kids....but I'm sure there must be some).....brief interruption there to shoosh one 3 year old back to bed and simultaneously lug about 75 lb of laundry to the basement....it's hard to imagine how you cope with a situation like this that might well go on forever, especially when you're not as lucky as I was in terms of having an understanding workplace (though, understanding as they were, I came within a hair of losing my career at tenure review time).
Being a parent is the hardest job in the world. Doing it by yourself, well, just unbelievable. I was a tourist. Hats off to the residents.
And now to laundry land.
posted by Colin at 8:34 PM
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