Surprise! I'm a single parent

I have been thinking for a while about how people don’t know their neighbours so much anymore – it’s not like when I grew up and we all knew each other (or so it seemed to me as a kid). I wanted to do something to get our neighbourhood together.

I’m really fortunate to have a woman who has become a good friend who lives three doors down the road. She has two kids who sit in age just ahead and just behind my youngest. They go to different schools but every afternoon they are at one another’s houses. Last year we were all excited when some people bought the place next to my friends and they had two kids in the same age group again. The kid web grew but that didn’t mean the parents were really getting together.

So we organised a barbeque between some of the families nearby so people could get to know each other. I think one of the most surprising things about this was how excited the kids were about it. One of the highlights of the event was the sight of seven children making their way through the broken fence between the section with the trampoline and the section where the adults were cooking and sitting around in the sun.

The lovely obliging neighbours who hosted ran out of gas on their barbeque as soon as he had started to cook and my friend turned to me and asked if we could go grab the gas of my exs barbeque. My ex had been invited but he wasn’t so keen. And I have to say I was OK with that. Now they wanted his gas bottle and they wanted me to get it. So I said it would be better if someone else asked him and off went my friend with my eldest daughter.

They got back with the bottle having re-extended the invitation and apparently my ex was going to turn up for half an hour or so. A couple of hours later I read my cell phone and my ex – never one for details – hadn’t realised where the barbeque was and there was a nasty text implying I had somehow omitted to tell him. So that was a bit of a damper, but as always these days the things which would have made me feel guilty and stupid now have the effect of demonstrating that my ex always did and still sometimes does seem to find blame with me when there are only the flimsiest connections. And that he no longer has the ability to hurt me like he did. These are my I DID THE RIGHT THING moments.

Meanwhile I think it was on step forward for our community in terms of being more than just people sharing geography.