It won’t surprise you to know that this isn’t the life I had planned; not the life I expected. I was raised by a single mother, and I thought I had done everything I could not to become one. Not because I didn’t love my childhood, but because I could see how hard everything was for her.
And I know how lucky I am. I write a lot in this blog about gratitude, and I really mean it. There are so many people out there who can’t have children for whatever reason and the impact this can have on their mental health and sense of self. There are so many people without the blessings I have had which result in me having a great career, good health, family and friends, the ability to provide for my children and watch them grow, and so, so much more. I am thankful every day.
But I am also exhausted. And frustrated. And sometimes I just want to scream into the dark night and I can’t even go for a beer or a run or have a chat without organising childcare and dealing with my children’s emotional needs first. During these months of home-schooling and juggling working fulltime from home, along with the usual home-and-child-admin and without the occasional respite of my mum coming to stay, I am just getting worse and worse at parenting – worse and worse at holding it all together. I’m not alone: research from the University of Oxford – and indeed common sense and even a cursory glance at social media – shows parents’ mental health has been massively impacted by this challenging period.
What-ifs have always been a mainstay of those 3am thought spirals. What if I had had children with someone else, and stayed together? What if I never meet anyone else? Might I meet someone if I were thinner/ prettier/ younger/ less career-motivated / didn’t move around so much? What will happen to me when my kids move out? Will we all make it until then?
I started this blog because I so rarely come across people like me in the FIRE movement. Sometimes I think it’s because we’re all just coping, all just knackered. There have been challenges to the lack of diversity in the FIRE movement and some brilliant female role models out there, and there are absolutely some single mums and single women. But the majority feels to me like couples: acres of material about getting your spouse on board; hours of podcasts of people who live off one income and save the rest, or have one parent stay home. Being a single parent sometimes feels like having fewer choices: like having the box you’re in get smaller and smaller.
Today’s gripe though, is more pedestrian. It’s about how single parent family status isn’t taken into account, and how shitty it is to either make a fuss to make it fair, or swallow it down and just make yourself angry whilst everyone else gets to feel ok.
This week we booked a holiday for the February half term (free to some extent since I got a refund from a holiday booked outside of Denmark so the cost already shows up in my 2020 budget!) in a summer house not too far from here. We booked with a family we like a lot: kids are good friends, we sometimes hang out all together for dinner and board games, and the mum is someone I go for occasional mum-drinks with others from school. All sounds great. But we are three (in two bedrooms) they are four (in three bedrooms). We agreed to do a grocery shop and share costs, but my daughter basically doesn’t eat (a story for another time) whereas one of their boys and the husband really wolf food down. She sent me the bill for my share today, which is a straight 50% of the total cost of both the rental and the food. Of course I paid it without a qualm and now sit up working on my stomach ulcer.
Sigh.
Call her! you think. Make a point, she’s not a mind reader! my mother would say. But you know – we have this all. the. time. And not just with money. Last time we went on holiday with two families there was an agreement where one set of parents would relax whilst the other set would look after the kids (usually split into mums and dads, taking it in turns). But when I went to relax there were mutterings that I wasn’t doing my share of the childcare: that I was taking advantage. So I ended up on child duty for the entire time, and relaxed even less than I would have if I was at home.
So we end up not holidaying with other families, and having it be more expensive. Or indeed just swallowing the cost rather than make a fuss and having it cost the same as it does for a two-income-family-of-four.
Next week I will write a more evidence based blog about the financial inequality of single parenting (and indeed being single). But for now, thanks for being a safe space for when things get hard.
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