Solo parenting

As I mentioned earlier, Craig was gone for more than a third of the summer. In addition to some shorter absences, on two separate occasions I was a solo parent for three weeks straight.

When people ask me how it went, I usually say, "Not too bad." Perhaps, like giving birth, it seems easier in retrospect? I must have had some resentment about Craig's absence, however, because I devoted at least one blog post to tallying up the hours I was spending trying to get Laurel to sleep. (I have to give him credit; he is doing his best to repay that debt.)

When Craig is away for just a few days, I use laziness as a coping strategy. I lower my expectations and let a lot of things slide: I order pizza or go to restaurants; on trash night I don't wheel out the garbage bins; I schedule daily playdates; we go to the park in the evenings. The house gets messy, we run out of groceries, and the kids stay up late.

But when he is gone for a longer period of time, I become more regimented. In this case I find that following a routine and being an organized homemaker makes parenting easier, perhaps because three weeks of pizza and unwashed dishes would make everyone malnourished and depressed.

In the course of our regular routine, I am not a housewife or homemaker. Although I am a stay-at-home mother, I consider the focus of my responsibility to be parenting, not cooking and cleaning. Craig has a job, I have a job, and we are egalitarian in our division of the remaining household duties. (It helps that we pay someone else to clean our house every two weeks, although I do have primary responsibility for straightening up the house so it can be cleaned.)

In our regular routine, I do the daily child-related cooking and cleaning -- I usually do the kids' laundry, feed them breakfast and lunch, tidy the kitchen afterward, put away their toys, and so forth -- and for many years now Craig has done most of the grocery shopping and the dinner planning and preparation. When he is away those jobs fall to me, and they are perhaps my biggest hurdles. I usually try to cut corners with frozen pasta and take-out burritos, but this summer I tried something different: I cooked. I broiled chicken breasts, and boiled lentils, and stir-fried asparagus, and stewed white beans with chard. I even baked several fruit pies, with crusts made from scratch.

One way I accomplished this unusual feat was by doing things at scheduled times -- boring, but helpful. For instance, every day about 4:30 p.m. I would give the kids their post-swimming snack, and while they were occupied with food I would unload the clean dishwasher, load the breakfast and lunch dishes, and start my dinner preparations in a clean kitchen. Every day about 7:00 p.m. when we had completed dinner, I would clean the kitchen again, load the dinner dishes into the dishwasher, and run it. As I did this, Isaac and Laurel tidied up one thing they had gotten out that day, such as putting away all the blocks or little cars. Then at 7:30 p.m. they brushed their teeth, then I put Laurel into her pajamas, then Isaac, then we read books, and so forth and so forth until Laurel finally fell asleep around 11:00 p.m. (only a slight exaggeration).

Do other people organize their lives like that? It was atypical for me; I usually try to keep the kids' meals and sleep on a schedule, but not housecleaning. But I found that I wanted to clean the kitchen every single night, or I would be filled with despair when I woke up in the morning and found the dirty dishes still waiting for me.

I realize this is a discussion of the practical mechanics of solo parenting, but not the emotional aspects of it. Did I ever get a break? Did I need moral support? Did the kids misbehave? Did we drive each other crazy? Did I crave some time alone?

We did visit my parents a few times, which was nice -- it gave me a bit of a break as well as providing moral support. Even besides that, the kids were amazingly well-behaved, and all three of us were very kind to one another. In fact, far from being driven crazy, I found myself getting angry with the kids less often, despite the extra demands placed upon me; perhaps the intensity helped me to parent more mindfully, perhaps I had lowered my expectations, or perhaps I just couldn't afford to waste energy on getting mad!

And what about some time alone? Well, that was the big sacrifice. Prior to this summer, for four or five months I had found time most days for my creative work (writing, painting, or gardening), but I didn't see how it could continue. So instead of trying to schedule time for myself, and then feeling resentful when it didn't work out, I decided to let it go completely. Even if I had found time to paint, it could easily have been a week before I could get back to it, and that would have made me even more dissatisfied.

But it's time to get back to it now.