As most of you know I split up with my husband last year. It’s been tough in many ways, sad, awkward and challenging but it’s also been enlightening and interesting. I have two kids, a bright, considerate 9-year-old daughter and a mischievous, stubborn 4-year-old boy. Becoming a single parent has taught me a lot, about myself and my kids. Here are some of the things I’ve learnt.
Kids don’t bounce. Not without help and support. Not without endless discussions about the past and the future (rarely about right now!). Think of all the emotionally suppressed adults you know and you’ll realise I’m right. They are willing to accept change as long as they know all the facts and there is someone to hold their hands when things get weird. My daughter has been worrying about everything, not just the big things, to the point of losing sleep. I found a brilliant book called “What To Do When You Worry Too Much”, it’s very American in style but it has been a huge help. We now have 15 minutes talk time every evening, not right before bed, where she unloads and I listen and deploy logic to help allay her fears, she is sleeping much better and finding it much easier to say things she thought she wasn’t allowed to say. Don’t get me wrong, she’s still an emotional mess but that’s just 9-year-old girls for you (I could write several blogs on this!). My son has been angry. He hasn’t been able to vocalise where the anger is directed to or from but, because I was expecting it, I have been able to help him articulate his feelings more and more. Having had counselling, I have learnt that asking him “how does that make you feel?” is a great way to get him to connect with his feelings and give him the opportunity to speak about them. They’re not bouncing but they are learning to accept a situation over which they have no control.
It’s ok to not be Supermum all the time. I do my best but some days the emotional energy tank has run dry. I have realised that on a Tuesday evening I am no good to anyone; I have battled the morning, the school run, been to work in a poorly paid job that I loathe, come home and slogged through the after-school jollies and by 5pm I am done. Instead of beating myself up about this, I have learnt to accept it. The boy has a tin of cold pasta for tea, it makes me heave just thinking about it but it’s his guilty food pleasure and he never argues about it like he does every other meal I cook him. The girl has super noodles, she loves it and regularly comes home on a Tuesday excited about tea. I have whatever I can be bothered to make, usually something on toast. I have been anal about food their entire lives so it’s been tough to let go but it is such a relief to know that Tuesday tea is never going to be a battle. I have also relaxed about housework, I only vacuum once a week, if that. I am often found on a Sunday evening hurrying through the laundry basket. Sometimes I don’t even put the toys away in the evening, unheard of in my married life days. I am happy to let my children entertain themselves, be it in front of the tv or playing, without feeling like I’m neglecting them, without feeling that the only thing in the world that makes them happy is to engage with me. Of course, we all do love engaging with each other but we also all enjoy half an hour of not having to talk to someone else.
Washing-up is wonderful. Yep, I’ve lost it. When there is another adult in the house things like washing-up become a battle, you resent having to do it more than your other half, you wake up in the morning, having gone to bed first, and find dirty dishes in the sink and become borderline psychopathic over it. When it’s just you, you just do it. It stops becoming a chore. You choose whether to go to bed with a sink full of dirty dishes that will be harder to wash in the morning and even if you do choose that path, you wake up and just do it. No anger, no resentment bubbling away, it’s just washing-up and it’s wonderful. This, I’m sure, can go for a myriad small household tasks, different for everyone, you know what yours would be even if you have no intention of becoming a single parent. I never used to put the bins out, now I don’t bat an eyelid at doing it, though I do have to regularly ask fellow villagers which bin it is. Accepting responsibility for all these minor things makes you wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place.
I’m actually not all that bad at DIY. In the first few weeks of being alone in the house, a light bulb fell out in the living room, not one I had put in. My son was in the living room when it happened and screamed so hysterically I assumed he was injured. When I had calmed him down he was desperate for Daddy to be called because he’s the one that fixes things. I put the bulb back in, to my son’s amazement and my own sense of deep satisfaction. Since then whenever something needs doing my son has no doubt that I am capable, which feels good, but I also don’t hesitate to just fix things, move things, make holes, use tools, YouTube “how to” videos and I am adding an arsenal of skills to my toolkit that I would not have previously attempted.
Cooking for one adult and two children is essentially cooking for one. My portion control is getting there but it has taken months of making enough food to feed us and my neighbours to realise – we just don’t eat that much. Part of this is that I used to overeat hugely, some strange feminist trait in me always whispered that, as adults, I should eat as much as any man, why should I have tiny portions like my Nan and so many women of her generation used to? Well, because eating isn’t competitive. I am smaller than most men. As a generation, we overeat anyway. I’m not comfort eating due to overwhelming unhappiness anymore, I eat when I’m hungry, sometimes I eat loads and sometimes I pick like the kids. I’m also realising that making sure my children eat everything on their plates isn’t as important as I thought it was. I try to avoid food waste as much as possible so accepting that kids will eat as much as they need to has been a great challenge.
I will always be lonely. Not all the time, I’m not looking for sympathy here, it’s just a fact. I’m fairly sure it’s not just a fact of my life either. There is something about feeling lonely when you’re in a relationship that makes you feel so impossibly small and helpless that you forget that there would be days that you would feel lonely if you were alone. Loneliness in a relationship is magnified because of your expectations of others. Much like the washing-up, loneliness when you’re alone is still unpleasant but so much easier to accept, so much easier to shrug off due to the simple fact that you are alone.
I am a recovering control freak. Last one. I always knew I liked things to be a certain way, I always knew I could get pretty damn pissed off if things didn’t go my way. I have some secret, minor OCD traits, (Page knows them and laughs at me, a great tonic!) that have kept me sane somehow. I am now learning to relinquish some of that control. I am trying not to obsessively plan every detail of tomorrow, allowing myself to go with the flow, whatever that is. I believe that this is in part because I am simply, happier and in part because I am the only adult in the house. I think perhaps my level of control was almost competitive in a way. I know longer see a table full of mess as a threat, as something I have to clear and put away MY way before someone else comes along and puts it away “wrong”. I no longer see an empty, weekend, square on a calendar as a wasted opportunity for family fun because I’m not competing to be the one that comes up with the fun. I am letting go of a lot and it feels good, most of the time, every now and then control freak pops up and I have to karate chop her in the head to um, regain control?!
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Females Forming Sentences 