It was Black Friday and I was supposed to be at work.
I've been parenting solo for past the twelve years, learning and growing alongside my children: S, the 18-year-old son and A, the 13-year-old daughter. Connect
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From her point of view
Cleaning out the storage closet to fill with my sewing goods, we came across all sorts of things including a French magnetic vocabulary set I’d bought for my daughter a couple years ago when she had a semester (or two?) of French classes. They never were used, but she couldn’t bear to get rid of them. Last night she asked if she could use them on the door and in my bleary-eyed exhaustion I conceded. I woke to find this neatly arranged by her. It says so very much in few words.
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Posted in miscellany
Ohhh, right, weeknight dinners.
I used to see the headlines on the women’s mags at the grocery and never could understand what difference it really made if it was a weeknight or a weekend dinner. Crazy publishers had something of the sort on every cover.
They still do, but now I get it. I understand how moms don’t want to get home from work at 6 p.m. after nine-plus hours away from home, just to start chopping, boiling, and baking for the evening meal. When I worked at the school, I was always home by 4:30, long before dinner needed to be served to starving kids. If it takes an hour to prepare and cook, who cares?!
These days the evenings are a bit more squished. After picking up and fighting through traffic for an hour, we finally get home sometime between 6 and 7 p.m. All I can think of to feed us is whatever is quick and easy. Rice with Trader Joe’s Madras Lentils. Spaghetti. Quesadillas. Now, I finally understand the difference between the weekends and the weeknights. And I think I’ll pick up a copy of Real Simple, with its Month of Easy Dinners.
And, of course, there is always my sister’s offer to help me cook up some big batches of freezer food. Maybe next month.
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Posted in miscellany, solo parenting
Me? You want to talk to me?
Just got off the phone with Nicole, calling from -get this- CBS. Yeah, the Early Show wants to talk to me after the article in Babble. Really? Little ol’ me?
Posted in miscellany
Difficult days.
There are times when I have loved being a single mother. There hasn’t been anyone to argue with about what I think is best for the kids. No one to tell me what to do or where to go. I don’t have to okay anything with anyone; their father gave up that right years ago. It is just me making decisions.
And that means it is me taking the blame, too.
Ask anyone what it is like to have a teenage daughter and they will rant on about the disrespect, the rude behavior, the attitude. I’ve talked to plenty of mothers over the last year or two–”Is this normal?” “Is she supposed to hate me so much?” “Am I really as stupid as she says I am?” Every mother nods, smiles and reassures that it’s just teenage girls; they are a force to be reckoned with.
Logically, I know that. I realize her frontal lobe isn’t developed, that teenagers generally do think the world revolves around them. I know that she is just saying it to upset me. And day after day, it does. It wears on me and I wish I had someone to hold me up when she shoots me down who could come in with a deep, masculine voice full of authority to tell her it’s no way to treat her mother.
I have friends, dear friends, who support me and remind me that it the daughter isn’t the authority and even when she makes cruel assertions, they are just the spouting of an 8th grade girl. They remind me to take deep breaths and let it roll off my back like a duck in water.
So I try. I inhale through my nose and fill my lungs, exhale slowly, purposefully through my mouth. And again. But there are days when those breaths dissolve into sobs and I ache for someone to step in, help us manage these treacherous waters. Those are the days the anger boils over at events long past, at relationships since faded and I wish more than anything that this young teenaged girl had two people to guide her. Two people who loved her and each other, to be the object of her wrath — instead of only me, alone.
Posted in solo parenting
Tagged absent fathers, family, raising daughters, single mother, struggles, teens
I still get teary, ten years later.
Leap
by Brian Doyle
A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.
Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.
The mayor reported the mist.
A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.
Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.
Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.
But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.
I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.
Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.
No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.
Copyright 2002, Brian Doyle. Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon.
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Posted in miscellany
The Final Countdown
School starts back up next Wednesday. I know we are weeks behind other areas of the country, but it still feels too early, too much like summer never really happened, to start that routine again.
With the lack of work, the summer was a long string of days searching for work, writing cover letters, struggling to make cash and cool days when I wondered if the entire season would just go belly up. Luckily there were some lovely moments, too. Belize. Camping. Sunsets and street fairs.
The housemates are back and the son’s voice has deepened oh-so-slightly. We haven’t heard his stomping overhead for nearly a month with our families’ different schedules and, to be honest, I haven’t missed it. The heavy footsteps are back, though, and the older they get, the louder they are on the floor below.
The daughter has bought school clothes with money from her grandparents. And she is trying to edge her sleep schedule backward toward a school-friendly 9 p.m. bedtime from her summer-crazy midnight turn-in. Meanwhile I’ve been the sack by 10 p.m., no matter what.
The son is coming back(!) in less than two weeks. The job fell through and he’s got classes ready for him at the college down the street. Come to find out, he can get financial aid after all!
Give me another coupe of weeks and thing will be in a new, but similar routine. Dropping one kid off instead of two. Heading north instead of staying put for work. And devising some schedule for the daughter to get home on her own. It’s a challenge, this new working mom life. But already it’s feeling better.
Now, I’m just waiting for my first paycheck since May. tap tap tap
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Posted in miscellany, solo parenting
29 Ways to be Happy & Creative
29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.
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Posted in miscellany
Working is Hard Work. Duh.
Three days in and I’m totally, completely exhausted from the inside out. Everything is tired–my muscles, my brain, my interest in doing anything at all. Really? Who knew it was this difficult to work eight hours a day?! Okay, so it’s not really the workday that is killing me, it’s the drive home, the errands afterward, the dinner and dishes and managing some time to watch a movie or TV show with the daughter so she doesn’t feel too neglected.
I’ve been going in early this week and will do so until school starts, but at that point, I’ll start going in a half hour later and coming home in even denser traffic. I’m certainly not thrilled with that, but it’s really the only negative the job has going against it.
Because the job itself rocks my world. I get to write blog posts, follow blogs, interview shop owners and fabric designers, try out new patterns and see the newest fabric lines before they hit the stores. Crazy awesome is what it is and I’m loving it.
Now, if my neck and shoulders could just get used to sitting at a desk all day and my body could get a full eight hours of nightmare-free sleep, I’d be without complaint.
But before hitting the hay, I have some reading to do for an article about apron collecting that I need to write tomorrow. Oh, new job, how I love you!
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Posted in rambling, ruckus time
Growing (up) pains
Despite the fact, that I celebrated my forty-first birthday this year, I have avoided some of the more grown-up expectations.
- I don’t own a house and never plan to.
- I don’t have a retirement account.
- I have never hired a lawyer (or a mover, for that matter).
- I don’t own my own car.
- And except for a nine-month window after I divorced way back in 1999,
I have never worked a 40-hour-a-week job.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It sounds totally ridiculous to be this old and never worked that much, though I was working full-time at the school, it was 35 hours per week and I had the benefit of driving with my kids both to and from work (since it was their school I was working at). I was a stay-at-home mom until the divorce. After, I got a full-time job and put my daughter in day care, a horrible experience for both of us. Since 2000, I have avoided having either kid in anyone else’s daily care. All the years I went to school, I dropped them off and picked them up from school. Then we left the country and they were with me except for the few hours a day when I taught and they stayed in our dorm room. We returned to the States and I got a job at their school. I saw both of them periodically throughout the day. And then this summer, I’ve been here (unemployed and penniless) with them.
But all of that is changing.
My son is coming back from California after the job fell through and will be attending community college at the campus just down the block.
My daughter will be on her own to get home, eat and work on homework every afternoon. I’ve always been here for that, always with her to help out when she’d let me, make her dinner. Now, I’ll have to trust that she learned the bus system well enough to get herself back home. I have to hope that she will get food for herself, a rarity for her since she frequently forgets to eat. I won’t be here to be the Mom I want to be and I have to trust that she’ll be okay with it all, but the guilt of leaving her like that is killing me.
Perhaps it will work with her brother back in the house, able to keep her company in the afternoons, someone to talk to and ask for homework help. But I am going to miss being with them both. It’s hard to let go of the 24/7 parenting that I’ve devoted myself to and it’s hard to admit that I don’t have control over everything.
My first day, an orientation of sorts, is tomorrow, then the real deal starts on Monday and I can already feel the time constraints. I just have to remind myself that millions of parents do this every day and that so many of them haven’t been as lucky as I to have spent so many mornings and afternoons with my kids. And, I have to remind myself, that it’s about time I grew up and got a ‘real’ job.
All you working mothers out there… is there something I can do to get past the guilt, the worry? Or is this just one of the joys of being a mom?
—
(Of course, when I factor in the fact that I have a GuyFriend that I adore being with and will now rarely see along with all my other friends and hobbies and unfinished projects, I just want to run away crying. I can’t, though, so we’re just gonna have to give it a try and see what happens. At least it’s a job I wanted.)
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Posted in rambling, solo parenting