Being a single parent can be hard for about 81, 324 reasons. The main one? Sometimes lacking the ability to just walk away from a situation with your child(ren) and take a much-needed break.
Isolation comes easy in a one-parent household – you're doing everything, there's schedules and bedtime responsibilities to meet, cooking and cleaning to do, a little known thing called income earning – you don't have enough hours in the day for your family, your home and yourself. The stress can be enormous, and sometimes we meet our limit.
There's been many battles in our life – my daughter's and mine – because we're both stubborn and emotional. Truth be told, we have tempers that exemplify Newton's third law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And it gets us into yelling matches, with her fists and feet flying and me helpless in the face of such violent outrage to do much more than take it.
Consequences mean little to her: time outs don't work, speaking on her level doesn't either, and giving her time in a safe space to get it out is a catalyst for further freak out-ism. One step further than that and she starts taking hitting, kicking and biting to a new extreme by hurting herself.
So, I have to give up sometimes. Not by giving her the thing she is arguing for, but by no longer enforcing what she's arguing against. Those have been the moments I've ended up sobbing, feeling like a failure as a mother.
That's where my support network comes in – because they're so vital to my own negative messages at that moment, it resets me and my reaction. This friendship is something I can rely upon because it's unchanging, loving and realistic – it doesn't glorify my efforts, nor does it knock me down. It brings the message, "it will be okay," without patronizing the frustration and well, grief I'm feeling. It is simply available to soothe what seems so very wrong.
Sure, as single parents, we learn to multitask like pros, and we are the epitome of choose your battles. But what happens when your breaking point is met and you're looking around at four walls in a panic?
You call a friend or a loved one. You sob into the phone, if you need to. Pour a glass of wine and wait for them to drive over. Whatever it is that your support network does to make it seem okay in that instant, you worship it.
Without it, it's easy to lose sight of what it is you're doing well because it may seem like everything you've done is wrong.
When she's not rocking a one-woman, one-toddler mosh pit in her living room, Zoeyjane lets her angst out at Mommy is Moody, blogs at The Baby Banter and Have a Happy Birthday, keeps the little things in mind, and Tweets like it's going out of style.
Loading ...
Comments are closed.