solo parenting - summer holiday edition

I've just dropped The Bean and Boo off with Dad, after three weeks summer holidays with them (minus one weekend). It is quiet in the house. Sweltering, sunny, and silent. 

This is Summer #2 as a solo parent with the kids. This year, we started out our holidays with a week at a rented cottage with Aunty K (one of my dearest friends) and her new puppy. It was a relief to have K's company. The kids love her, she's lots of fun, and there was another adult to talk to in the evenings. K had to leave a day early, so I had one night and a full day alone with the girls. 

As I tucked them into bed that night, it occurred to me that I was alone. In the middle of nowhere, relatively speaking, and the only one responsible for them. I suddenly felt very vulnerable. What if something were to happen to me? What if I had an aneurism? What would happen to the girls? I've never really thought about it before, but it occurred to me again just last night, as I leaned over my precarious basement stairs and almost slipped. If I were to fall down the stairs while they are asleep, and hit my head and died, they would be the ones to find me. And that only after they got up, called out for me and started a search that would become more and more frantic.

I've also started wondering what would happen to them if I became gravely ill. Of course, they have their dad to take care of them, but how often would I see them? If I didn't have the energy to care for them, I would have to relinquish our shared custody arrangement. I would barely see them. I would barely be a mom anymore.

Now, I'm not a hypochondriac by nature, so I feel silly even thinking those things, but they cross my mind more and more. I realise that I had taken so much for granted in a two-parent household. I also realise that I have it pretty good, because I do have a co-parent, one I'm lucky to get along moderately well, especially in the parenting realm. I am not a single parent: if something happens to me, I know that they are well cared for by another parent who loves them as much as I do.

Being a divorced parent with shared custody is a strange world. The time I spend with the kids is intense given the very nature of me being alone with them. But then I spend long periods of time (one week on, one week off) without them. It's a rhythm that I'd started getting used to. Summer throws a monkey wrench into everyone's schedule, and mine is no exception. The Bean and Boo will be with Dad for the next three weeks. I'll see them for a weekend in there. Doesn't seem like nearly enough.

it feels good to feel good

The past six months, from the last post, has been an eventful period. Not quite ready to let go, I sat in limbo. In the in-between place. I worked on me. I worked on getting to the root of why I had be so indecisive. The truth is that in the past six months, I have questioned and questioned my direction. Not trusting my gut. Not being okay - not completely okay. The in-between place was filled with turmoil, sadness, and a deep sense of feeling trapped.

Something happened a few weeks ago. I can't put my finger on the exact date, or an exact moment. But everything I'd learned about myself, everything I'd learned about relationships - it all came together. And suddenly, I was okay. I realised I'd been hanging onto something so tight that I hadn't noticed that it was gone. I let my grip go, and the hurt left. The pain was gone, and there was light again.

I take a deep breath, and I smile. I'm okay. I'm solid. I can do this, and I'm going to rock it. Because I have joy.

The wheels have started to turn on the final details of the separation; we've just met with a mediator, and we are separating the last of our assets. Soon, I will have my own funds to buy my own house. Our house. Just for us girls. And it will be pretty, and it will be warm, and it will be inviting, and it will be peaceful. Because I am all of those things.

It feels good to finally feel good.

New Year

2012 was a strange year. The few people I know well who are divorced say that their first year was the roughest, ugliest year of their life. They were happy to see the back end of it. 2012 certainly was not easy, but interspersed with its moments of abject despair were moments of brightness.

2012 saw the dawning of a new me. Someone self-confident, independent, and sure. The person I'd become at work, where I'd been promoted twice in three years, was spreading to other parts of my life. I overcame my shyness and fear of a roomful of people to mingle in. I was calm and at ease with new people. I made conversation - both small talk and meaningful connections. I learned to be vulnerable with friends and trust that they would still love me. I learned to speak my mind and understand my tastes. I learned that I am important, too. My opinions matter. And I learned to live like I believed it.

2012 also saw moments of intense self-doubt and second questioning and fear. I remember crying alone in the deep, dark night, knowing that I would surely die alone, unloved, unwanted. I remember feeling incredibly small and insignificant. There were moments of feeling completely friendless. Completely rudderless. Completely empty. And tired, so very, very tired.

For all its ups and downs, for all its pain and suffering, I would not trade 2012 or wish it never happened. I do not regret 2012, for it has taught me much and left me with a better, stronger me. I do, however, look forward to 2013, and hope and pray it has more ups than downs, more hope than despair, more peace than anxiety. I hope that for all three of us.

the D word

It has been over a year since I set out on my own, my girls with me half time, my heart with them full time. Just over a year ago, I left the family home I'd settled into with my husband, left the comfort of dual incomes, left the safety of a having a backup parent, left the security of being married. The reasons are, as always, more complicated than one can describe in a blog post, deeper than a few paragraphs can convey, too intimate to share with the world. And they are immaterial to the life I will describe here.

When I had first decided I would move out permanently, I took a week off work to deal with the emotions, with the details, with the panic attacks that followed phone calls and appointments that set up my new housing. I couldn't bring myself to tell people at work what had happened, but I didn't want them to ask me how my husband was doing. So I dispatched two good work friends to tell the rest, quietly, that I was separating. Within weeks, I learned to accept my new situation, learned to say, "I'm separated."

After a year of separation, it became clear that a final decision, one way or another, was in order. My life in limbo, in the in-between place, needed formality. It needed direction. And we settled upon formal and final separation. A d....

The D word is one that I have uttered fewer than five times in the month since we decided. I was talking to a friend of mine who is also separated about it.

"I know, right? It's just such an ugly word!"

And I agreed. Separated is a smoother, kinder word. D... is harsh, angry, almost violent.

But it is my new reality. I head into the world, not just a separated person, but soon to be a divorcée. I'm building a life on my own, with my two little girls. We are settled nicely into a little house I rent, not far from their dad's house so that the commute back and forth isn't too rough. Nestled among the little houses on our narrow street is our red-doored A-framed house, we've made a home for the three of us.

This is the story of that home.