Surprise! I'm a single parent

It happened on Wednesday. It happened by email. I opened it waiting for the latest hold up but in the end there just weren’t any more hold ups left. I own my house. Just me and the bank. I have my own life. I am no longer attached.
Interesting note: The property conveyance cost more than the separation agreement.
Speaking of which – there is a slow but steady trickle of readers requesting the separation agreement. I’m changing my email in a few weeks and although I’ve changed it here I notice that comments to older posts go to the old address still. So – if you want it, comment to this post or ones that come tumbling after.
(Can you name the nursery rhyme that inspired that last sentence?)
It’s been a grey and gloomy weekend weather wise – time to hunker down. We have made the most of it. I’ve managed to get out with the dog and burn a few calories, we went to the garden shop and got strawberries, a passionfruit vine and a lemon tree, we ate potatoes in their jackets and finally I took a list to the supermarket and did a speed buy to the soundtrack of Thriller. Presume it was a long play version.

Yup only in America does a woman give birth to Octuplets and she’s already a single parent to 6 children.  Shock horror!  I don’t know why she didn’t just go work in early childhood.

The debate here is around intentional single parenting and intentional access to state support and, just how many is enough children – both at one time and altogether. The Octuplets Mum appears to be  greedy with fertility treatments, grasping for state support  and blatantly doing without a Dad.

She’s an extreme example that lets us see our prejudices, values and morality more clearly.

While it wasn’t my gig, I do have a couple of girlfriends who have become a parent with various forms of donor ingenuity.  I also have a few more friends who have made incredibly unwise choices to have children with very unsuitable men. I fear far more for the offspring of the second group because like almost nothing short of incarceration is going to stop their no-good Dads having some negative impact on their lives. If I were choosing between Mr Almost right, Mr Suspect and Mr Test-tube I know who would cause the least grief in the long run.

In an earlier blog I brainstormed how I might select a lawyer. I thought I should mention I still haven’t got one. This is largely because of the feedback I’ve had regarding their general usefulness.  Their main skill seems to be taking money off people without progressing settlement particularly well. What I have taken from this is that if you are able to talk to each other you might as well negotiate your own settlement, if you cannot talk to each other you still might as well negotiate your own settlement because all you gain from a lawyer or two in the mix is a greater barney with a price tag.

One of my friends has spent several thousand on a lawyer and gotten nowhere – she’s got another lawyer now.

My ex has a lawyer. A last minute, slow, and somewhat illiterate lawyer. Strangely he doesn’t want me to know her name. This would seem to be an impediment to negotiating with her. So I have gone from selecting a lawyer for me – to detecting the lawyer of the ex.

I feel a bit sorry for the ex-lawyer because I am now in stage 5 of the separation stages. These stages are:

1. I’ll settle for nothing just to get out

2. He can take anything he likes as long as I can feed the kids

3. Actually there are a few things I came to the marriage with and I should keep

4. Hang on a minute I worked the whole time and earned more and still did all the housework – I deserve half

And now stage 5: screw it I’m gonna take everything I can this guy has kept me waiting too long and now the blinkers are off I realise I’ve been totally walked over for 15 years and I’m not taking it anymore.

My smallest child was grumpy and eating her dinner slowly before she went. I thought I could get upset or give her something else to be upset about and then this handover will be a full on melt down. So i didn’t do that I sent her Dad a text and said she was still eating. I let her finish and suggested she leave with a popsicle. Yeah, I know, easing the way with food but hey, it worked and she went off happily.

It would be easy to believe that my children are heading off to a week of gloom, malnourishment and benign neglect on Friday when they move from my house to his.  It would be easy to project that on them. Easy to read it from some of the things they say. But they are just moving to another parent who does things differently.

Recently it occured to me he may feel similar anxiety about my parenting. For instance before he thought it was appropriate I had drilled the kids extensively so that I knew they could cross the road on their own. (Hmmmm that’s probably going to generate a few emails. I am always amazed how my little intermittant blog attracts criticism of my parenting.)

It’s taken me a few years to figure out how i could reclaim my previous potision but now I’ve done it. Wheel of Fortune! I’m just sharing in case YOU were displaced by the teacher years ago and haven’t found a way to be credited as intelligent since.

You’ve got to love breakfast. For some reason it feels OK to have the same thing for breakfast 4 or 5 or 6 or even 7 days in a row. Three days for any other meal and you know you are a slacker or have an eating disorder. It’s not seen as detrimental to the mental health of your loved ones if you leave them to forage for their own cereal and every eats at a different time and has a different thing. As long as they have breakfast you get a big tick as a Mum.

Breakfast is so great that I often start feeling like breakfast just as I’m slipping off to sleep.

Breakfast doesn’t have a lingering smell like dinner can and if it can be detected its lovely and toasty or bacony and half an hour later if you encounter it you have fond feelings instead of wishing you had an extractor fan.

Breakfast is fast food BUT its not bad fast food like McDs or fish and chips. Breakfast however is chock full of acceptable sugar which gives you a nice high to start the day.

If you don’t quite manage to get breakfast at home you can dip into your emmergency supply of muesli at work and use their milk too – and people just think you are diligent wanting to get started on your emails instead of lounging around at home in your jarmies.

Breakfast has interesting TV with snippets of actual news alongside constant reminders of the time and the weather for people who can’t focus on their watches or draw their curtains.

Normal eating protocols don’t count in the morning. Its acceptable to eat breakfast on your lap, on the run, in the bathroom, at the sink and to undertake other things while you eat it. Every agrees its great to have breakfast in bed!

When I make pancakes its much less effort than most dinners but for some reason everyone feels like its a treat and thanks me for doing it. Even better if I buy a new brand of sugary cereal and place it to be found on the counter the breakfasters are as excited as if its xmas morning and they’ve found goodies uner a tree. But I get the credit!

I find myself fascinated by Sarah Palin.  Beauty queen, mother of five, soon to be granny, governor of the other country of alaska, republican vice presidetial candidate. As close as any woman has been to the white house. Who wouldn’t slow down and look?

I have a  sinking Shipley feeling and I can’t look away.

Ive been thinking lately that politicians are the wrapping paper of elections. They are a product as much as the policies of their party. What sparked this was the revelation that a Canadian politician had given a speech which bore a great similarity to an Australian politicians speech. Google inadvertantly highlighted some lazy speech writing and a speech writer in Canada has subsequently resigned from their job. But…. how come we accept that politicians don’t write thier own words?

So ‘presidential debates’ are the spontaneous displays of what they might really be like. Maybe. How much can you know of a person beyond the packaging and the random finds of them on teh internet. I wonder if Sarah blogs?

If I accept that politicians are primarily (in their campaigns at any rate) orators of party rhetoric that is styled as their own words then we shouldn’t be too critical of their private lives – lives that we can never understand anyway. Ive seen a you tube clip of Sarah being blessed away from witch craft – probably something she shares with Elizabeth the first.

I can’t help contrasting Palin with Helen Clark. Not a beauty queen or a mum, a life time politician. Pilloried for not wearing the right clothesand not being pretty for the first few years. Heres a beauty queen and she’s sneered at for that. different sides of the political fence and different countries. I guess almost nobody un teh US knows there is an election on down in New Zealand. I only just clued there is one in Canada.

At the begining of the election cycle I was feeling really sick of politics. I think it was partly the obama/clinton thing. And partly the steady demoition of politicians by nationaland act over the apst few years. I said I was going to switch off the tv till after the election. But since we’ve been plunged into a global fiscal crisis its got a lot more interesting.  The Chinese say it is a curse to live in interesting times. Surely for politicians at election time it is a blessing – or for their speech writers at least.

Tonight I was talking to someone about beauty. What did she say? Something like: “Some people are gifted with attractiveness.” She is in her 20s. I am in my 40s.

I said to her you know what? As you get older you want to be with people because of their substance and not what they look like.  But anyway, you also realise how everyone is attractive and there’s a lot more diversity in what seems to be attractive. I really believe that.

When I was younger I thought I was so ugly. My assessment was based on not being perfect. I had much much higher standards for myself than anyone else – I was harsher on me. And this impacted on my self esteem – I dressed to be the third most interesting person in the room. Does that sound weird? I always assumed there were brighter and more beautiful than me and I viewed compliments with suspicion.

My Mum said: You are so beautiful when you smile – and I heard: You are not beautiful except theres a flicker of something when you smile.

I have two beautiful girls and it occured to me one day that to have such georgous kids maybe I wasn’t as 100 percent ugly as I thought. The other thing that helped was a digital camera. I spent the first two years being official photographer and then i thought we aren’t wasting fim here lets let the kids drive. Not stressed out by pictures I could delete I relaxed and had fun and now I have some pics of me that show someone who looks fine. Pity I waited till I was forty to understand that but that’s cool.

I am actively thinking about ways I can let my children know they always were and always will be beautiful.

I touched a nerve when I blogged about what being a parent is about. I said:

“My kids also spend regular time with their Dad. I wouldn’t exactly call him a parent … but there is no doubt he cares about the kids and to a kid having someone around who says he loves them is often just as good as a real parent – as long as there is an actual parent around too.”

 Well Kim I didn’t intend this blog to be a big whine about my ex – I was rather thinking I’d use it to explore my new state on my own. I would quite like to get to a place where I don’t have to bite my tongue about him in front of my kids.  But you asked and I will tell you from my probably hugely biased point of view:

When I met my partner in my early 20s he was already a Dad and I had no experience of parenting. He told me over and over how he loved and missed his child and wanted to spend time with him.

In the early days I noticed he had the odd tendency to race off fishing on his child’s one weekend a month visit with us. At the time I stupidly put this down to the completely terrible weather where I live coupled with his passion for sitting for hours in a little boat in the cold of the ocean hauling in kaimoana (that’s Maori for seafood I thought I might try and bring in a little NZ culture). And I also noticed that all the ‘caring’ – feeding the child and thinking about their needs went straight away to me.

I became a sort of parent secretary for him:

“He might need shoes on before he goes outside.”

“He should probably go to bed now.”

“why don’t you call him?” “Why don’t you see if you can get his school reports?” “What are you gong to get him for his birthday?” “Why don’t you check he knows about safe sex?”

My husband to be had a knack of saying the right things and being very charming and I was absolutely smitten by him. Five years into the relationship we had our first child. Before she was conceived I made sure he understood we were parenting together. Oh yes yes he said I love beng a parent. Before she was born he told me how helpful he was going to be, how he knew how to change nappies and just loved babies. During my pregnancy he carefully outlined bit by bit the limitations he needed to put on the scope of his involvement. He told me he could never get up to a crying baby in the night – because he worked with power tools and might have an accident if his sleep was broken. I accepted this. Stupid me! That was the year he discovered Warcraft  and stayed up late night after night swearing and shouting and being angry as he killed little monsters. But not once did he bring me our child.

He told me it was very important he was happy and happiness for him was fishing. I said I only want you to be happy dear – you go fishing – but perhaps occasionally when you are not getting up on the weekends to fish I might have a lie in? That’s another thing he said – I’m very tired after a weeks working – try and keep the children quiet in the mornings so I can have a lie in (when not fishing). 

Then my husband remembered he always liked tramping and hunting – and soon his fishing was supplemented by these hobbies too. I still don’t really mind that he did this so much I just wish he could have thought about spending some time with his kids in the way he seemed to love spending time with boats and packs and guns.

My husband could lie on the couch sleeping while I cooked and a baby cried. I couldn’t leave the children with him and expect they would be fed – to this day if they are going somewhere with him you will see them dive to the kitchen and eat before they go because they expect they will be hungry otherwise. He was a completely unreliable babysitter. I could never commit to going anywhere unless I asked my mum or a babysitter to look after the kids. So: I hardly ever went anywhere. I became the person other people leave their kids with.

When we split he asked for shared care and I said YES! If we had had anything approaching this in our relationship we may not have split. You can have them as much as you like, I said. What he likes so far is every second weekend. He picks them up late – he drops them back early.

However: You have no idea how improved my life is now I can book a hair appointment, walk his dog, stroll at my own pace through a gallery, sit down and blog or write, and spend the morning reading the Saturday paper uninterrupted. It is such a privilege to have that freedom after the prison my life became.

I want to be fair Kim – I need to tell you the house close by he shifted to has needed work so its habitable for the kids. That is why we are ‘working towards’ shared care. But I’m also aware he never calls the kids. He was looking after them for 2 hours on Thursday nights at first but he does a sport – did I mention this? And he decided to do that 4 nights a week so gave up seeing them weekly.

I have hopes and fears about shared care. I guess I will blog about them in another entry. You made some other excellent points Kim and I hope I will be able to get around to commenting on them. Right now I brought work home and I need to look at it. I have a date with my electric blanket and some rather boring papers.

of course I wasn’t always a single parent. I was cautious about parenting altogether. I was 30 before I had my first child. And I was cautious about being a solo mum. I was with my kids father for 15 years before I upped and left him. 

Now I’m a solo mum I find myself thinking about that title: what does it mean? In a way my kids have more parents than they did before. Their dad has gone from passive to active. And ‘single’ parent – that sounds far too NZ datingesque.

So proud owner of a dog and a HUGE mortgage and custodian of two kids I no longer pick up my ex’s socks and explain to a babysitter I need to book her cos I have no way of knowing if its good fishing weather or not. Im still sleeping on my side of the bed but there are some good books and the remotes on the other side – and guess what they don’t snore.

It has been the first summer of my singleness. Lawn keeps growing and I will learn mowing.