A funny thing happened on my way through this pandemic. I figured out how to be a mom to my two boys. I’ve always been a big fan of theirs, so it was cool to have the chance to really get to know them and figure out how to be myself around them over the past year. As I’ve talked to friends and colleagues about my year, I’ve often been met with “I don’t know how single parents are doing it.” I think it’s supposed to be an expression of sympathy, but it rarely comes with curiosity, and it’s always a broad general “single parents,” instead of specific to my experience. I find the phrase to be more of a passing wonder. Despite that, I always answer, “we’re not, really.” Then everyone chuckles and we all move on.
I’m sure people like to keep a very specific picture of a single mom like me in their minds - tough, capable, warrior queens (a title I’ve been given more than once, and never feels like it fits) who can Do It All - without the messy behind the scenes truth. Sorry, people. It’s messy back here.
Pre-pandemic, I measured my life against a different cataclysmic event - my divorce. Pre-divorce, I was the sole breadwinner, my ex-husband was a student and stay-at-home dad. After each paltry American maternity leave, I’d kiss my sweet new little person on the head and go back to work, where I somehow found myself climbing the corporate ladder, which was not ever a thing I could have imagined myself doing until I was doing it.
The boys’ dad took them to the playground and to doctor’s appointments and to school. And I was there for dinner and bedtime and weekends. I still planned the holidays and birthdays and meals (though, I blessedly did not have to cook them). I made sure their hair was cut and their pants fit, but in most other ways, I was a classic 1950s dad. I barreled through the door after a long commute or business trip, poured a drink, sometimes went to a quiet room to unwind before I could “handle” the kids’ energy after dealing with adults all day. Plus, I didn’t want to step on their dad’s toes, parenting was his main responsibility, I’d be pissed if he tried to tell me how to do it, so I was the backup parent, out of respect, I figured.
To be honest, I didn’t think about it that much while I was in it, and haven’t had a lot of time to process it since, so I’ll just wrap up pre-divorce time by saying there was a real post-divorce learning curve. A part of that learning curve also now included my youngest’s very real separation anxiety appearing in wild places like refusing to wear any pants other than 4 very specific pairs of elastic cuffed sweatpants, and my oldest’s diagnosis of Asperger’s and ADHD. Suddenly, I had to figure out how to cook dinner every night, and advocate for 504 accommodations, and comfort and entertain 5 and 7 year old boys.
I’d already missed a ton of their little, little years, then we spent a year and a half in post-divorce chaos, then boom - pandemic. It just so happened that I was laid off three weeks before everything shut down, so I had some time on my hands for the first time in my career. We were trapped in a house together with no known end date. And I was finally confronting the trauma of my marriage and my last workplace. I had no fucking idea what I was going to do.
I remember one day asking the boys how they wanted to feel when we got through all of this and they both said, “calm.” So, achieving calm became my prevailing objective. It was, as they say, easier said than done.
I don’t know how many women you’ve known really well who have just gone through a divorce, but there tends to be a bit of a caged tiger (cougar?) phase at some point in the recovery process. An itching to get out and be wild and sexy and free. This is a challenging phase for the single mother in the best of times, but under quarantine restrictions, it’s extremely tricky. I was also at first deliberately, and then because I had no choice, starting my own consulting business, my hours were wild, my days were filled with big ideas and minute details and my nights with flirty texts. I was not calm. I was in raw, manic survival mode. The boys were just along for the ride.
This was particularly unfortunate for all of us because we also now had school to do together. Here’s the thing about school. I hate it. I maybe have always kind of hated it. Even though I was smart, I was not a good student. Not in any grade. Not in high school or college. I suspect a little of that ADHD my oldest has, to be honest, along with an innate anti-authority streak. And my kids don’t really love it either.
The youngest, now nearly 8, still needed to be pushed to get in line with his classmates right up until our last day of in person school. And the oldest’s special needs in combination with going to a new school last year made him a prime target for the 4th grade bullies. Plus, even though I quickly made some cool playground parent friends, talking to other parents is one of my least favorite things about being one. It just is. So, our little trio was kind of relieved those first couple of weeks. We were all getting a bit of a break from the everyday mini-torture that is school life for introverts.
I checked out of the whole striving for success process and our family mantra became “try our best,” with best being redefined on a daily basis, though staying generally in the vicinity of just showing up.
When it became clear we weren’t going back to school for the rest of the year, I took stock. It was obvious teachers were just doing their best with what they had available to them. Standard competencies weren’t being taught in the tested way anymore so it was really just an educational free for all. And, I noted, both boys could read. I took this data and decided that my first order of Calm Business was to be super chill about school. This mostly worked. Sometimes a child or I would be having a bad day, and school was our scapegoat. But for the most part, I checked out of the whole striving for success process and our family mantra became “try our best,” with best being redefined on a daily basis, though staying generally in the vicinity of just showing up.
By mid-summer, I was busy with coaching and consulting clients, and school was out of session so the boys played video games and ran through the sprinklers while I hustled. I’d taught them to do their own laundry and make nachos in the microwave and we were on our way to a general calm-ish kind of vibe.
Then school started again. With my full schedule and the boys’ schools coming off the summer with a bit more planning than our first round of remote learning, things were really different. The youngest was mortified by his precious screen time turning into an absolute torture chamber of Google Classroom and Zoom meetings and something no child seems to enjoy called Zearn. The wrongness of it all sent him into an anxiety tailspin centered on a full blown fear of being on camera.
Meanwhile, the oldest was a middle schooler. Prior to the shutdown, entering middle school - where there would be bullies ranging from 5th to 8th grade, not just measly 4th graders - was his singular nightmare. And yet, here he was, safely on the other side of the screen. While his brother wilted, he flourished. No field trips or special assemblies made every day’s schedule exactly the same. He had a timer he set for breaks between classes, which he happily spent running laps around the stairs in the basement thinking of new worlds. Where he once spent a good part of the day several days a week in the nurse’s office with a migraine and just needing a break from it all, he was now in every class, every day. It was a miracle.
After months of battling with the youngest’s teacher to just leave him alone about being on camera, I finally lost it and told the school counselor that I’d go through the whole process of getting him diagnosed with anxiety so we could build out a 504 plan, or we could save everyone a bunch of time and paperwork and just agree to let the kid turn the camera off. A winning approach! The next week, we were living a camera-off school life and the little guy became, overnight, a new person. He finally had someone listen to him, take him seriously, and give him a small slice of control over his otherwise really out of control feeling life. And that someone was ME! His own actual mom. We were onto something.
By December, most of my clients had wound down and I was in the process of writing a proposal that would have taken over the first part of the next year if I got the gig. I was burnt out working in the early morning and late night hours so I could monitor school and take care of things like making sure everyone ate and bathed and slept in clean beds. I’d given up on pandemic dating. It was the dead of winter. Holidays as a single parent are hands down my least favorite thing about single parenthood. Trump was still refusing to accept defeat. They were dark days.
I wasn’t frenetic like I’d been in the early days of trying to create calm, I was exhausted. People would send check-in texts asking how I was, and I’d just say “exhausted.” It was not a compelling conversation starter. By the end of the year, I was literally sick and tired.
Pre-divorce, I’d started the traditional Woman’s Search For What Is Wrong WIth My Body. Because you know how mysterious the woman’s body is to medical science. I wondered about my thyroid and about fibromyalgia. I discovered some arthritis in my spine, but hadn’t quite nailed down the cause of all those dang UTIs that kept testing as not actually UTIs and/or that antibiotics didn’t seem to work on. By the end of December, I was in a flare up so intense I spent days in bed, shuffling down to my basement office with my computer and lip gloss for the occasional meeting. I was one test away from an interstitial cystitis diagnosis, but whatever the cause, some radical lifestyle changes were in order. My ability to handle it all appeared to be finite, and I was out of reserves.
I quit drinking alcohol and caffeine and things with bubbles. I gave up chocolate, tomatoes and other acidic food and drinks. I drank my recommended daily intake of water and then some, and started pelvic floor guided meditation every morning and night. It’s been 10 weeks and last week I only had one day in exhausted pain between two 5-day streaks of feeling like a pretty healthy person. I also quit stressing out about work. And no longer had to stress out about school because both boys were finally doing well.
The oldest is learning skills to alleviate his anxiety in this controlled environment that we never would have gotten to in the “real” world. The littlest was so excited and happy to have gotten some control back into his day he was working extra hard on his assignments. Ironically, that means instead of having to help him with or look at something every 30 minutes, we’re closer to every 15. I started hanging around the kitchen more often to be available for him. Everybody’s snacks got way better now that I was eating less processed food and sugar all the time. The boys started drawing pictures again.
There are days now when lunch time rolls around and I don’t have a meeting and we’re all gathered together in the kitchen, dogs sleeping in the patch of sun on the floor, the cat trying to steal pepperoni off a plate, boys talking about invented Pokemon characters, and it is so calm. Perfectly, beautifully, naturally calm. I finally did it.
But that goal came at a cost. I know I need to turn my business self back up again soon. Meanwhile, the school just announced plans to reopen full time either early or late April. I know we all need to get out of the house and remember what it’s like to be around other people again. That the boys will be so amped to run around with kids their age. I know once I get a taste of that freedom that has defined me my entire life that I’ll drop all the way back into my body and be complete again. Same goes for easier access to the occasional loving touch by unsticky hands.
But, I’m afraid of taking control away from my kids again. Of taking away this sense of calm we created together and worked really hard to achieve. I’m miserable thinking of being separated from them for so much of the day every day. Even more so thinking of the battles we’ll have as we try to leave the house on time with all the things we’ll have to remember and finding parking and, heaven help me, having playground parent conversations. I’m nervous that change will mean more stress and my body won’t handle it. Being professional homebodies suited us in the end, and it sucks that we have to give that up for the extroverts’ definition of normalcy.
It sucks that going back to school means the oldest going back to bullies IRL and leaving my baby in the hands of someone who just won’t get him Iike I do, and filling my time with making money instead of making plates of Triscuits and blueberries. I was just starting to get good at this.
We’ll adapt like we’ve done post-divorce and mid-pandemic. I don’t think any of us will look back on the past year longingly. It was mostly really tough. But, as the family motto goes, I’ll try my best to bring the best of what we created together forward into the next stage, where I’m a pretty good mom, and things are calm.