Surprise! I'm a single parent

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.

Did you ever see the movie Fargo?  Great movie on lots of levels. A super cool thing about it is the protagonist – a female cop in a snowscaped rural america – is very very pregnant as she investigates a murder or two. This got me thinking (oh i dunno maybe it didn’t but i know at some stage i got to thinking) and the think I was mulling over was how protagonists (the main characters in books) are usually single and no kids. 

An unfettered hero is great for a writer. No need to stop the plot while they go to work,  find a baby sitter, cook the family dinner, wait on the phone to sign up for next terms swimming, or hold out till pay day before they can afford to travel to the next point in their journey. In fact part of the happy ever after is often settling down to a life where ‘adventure’. 

Anyone who has been reading this blog knows I’m living in post happy ever after. 

Well it’s often ocured to me we need more stories like fargo – in fact farther along than fargo. Stories of Mums having lives as well as kids would be cool. I’ve thought of writing them mysef but I’m so fricking busy being a Mum and working and the occasional blog. But then I was reading up on my new weird fascination: Sarah Palin and I came across reference to ‘Mom lit’. Wow really? 

Of course then i was dissapointed. It turns out Mom lit is the spawn of chick lit and the apple isn’t rotting far from the tree. Boo. I am always a person to judge a book by it’s cover and chick lit is just too pink and kooky Mary Quant looking. (Hmm what would Sarah Palin think?) 

But here’s the thing – in the instant when i thought I knew what Mom lit was (the sort of Mom lit I wanted to write) I was all excited but I was also thinking to myself why wasn’t I writing that and now I’ve discovered there is a job still out there to do! Much more interesting than vacuuming.

Last month my power bill was $469. Ask my kids – I said it so often they know the number off by heart. Bills like that just make me want to … blog. (lol) I checked and last year at the same time and my bill was $100 less. My first thought was that it was caused by a friend who came to stay for a week with her teenagers – the two kids completely drained the hot water tank some nights with their showers. Then my ex came over and I asked him could he please take away his hunting fridge. He looks inside and there are two peices of venison now horribly rotten in an iced up expanse. I think we found the problem!

So it was a stinky job cleaning out the fridge but now it’s done. And, importantly, an energy sucking leach of an appliance is now unplugged. As if to prove its malignant drain on my finances the next power bill came in today and its 240 less. Of course Im taking shorter showers, switching stuff off and not using heaters as much now but… I still blame that freezer.

It has rained so much in my town this winter that I feel like I could have had some sort of hydro power device coming off my roof line. A friend went to solar power last year and even through winter its been supplementing her use of the national grid. Its just a shame it costs so much to get that installed. Hers cost about 7k. Grid power costs me about $2500 a year. I wonder how much solar offsets your power bills? But maybe I shouldn’t be looking at it just from a cost perspective – it might just feel better to be more energy independent.

Divorce in New Zealand takes at least two years. This is an excessively long time so my advice to anyone thinking seriously about leaving their partner is to get on and do it. You really can’t procrastinate or think things will get better. It took me about 6 years to decide to leave and it was kind of insulting to find the law adds another 2 on for good measure.

I suppose they want you to be really really sure – perhaps they don’t want people getting divorced and then getting remarried? But surely weddings are good for the economy? Unlike investment properties which supposedly stagnate domestic turnover, weddings provide employment and expenditure. And marriages are investment in hope, well being and family. So why drag the chain? And what about biological clocks? If I met someone who wanted anotehr child I’d have no choice but to sprog first and nuptual later which – though really I don’t mind – seems a bit unfortunate for those who do.

In my case however it doesn’t matter whether Im not married or not because the glacial speed of my financial decoupling is the main thing I fret over.  

Recently I applied to a bank for a loan. Well, permission to borrow should I get into the happy position that we are financially seperate enough that I need my own mortgage. And here’s when bureacracy became entangled like a mobius strip of logic. For a few days there, it seemed the bank needed assurance I had no shared debt with my ex-partner before they could lend me swag loads of money to be out of mutual debt with my ex-partner. It was perhaps fortuitous I had another 13 months to go on my marriage to work this one out. 

Kiwibank suggested that a seperation agreement was the magic ingredient to loosen the bureacratic knot. Hmmmm well I have friends who have spent thousands on lawyers trying to get one of those sorted and I wasn’t going to start paying one if I had to. What was the essential information they were going to glean from this paper I said? This was a good question and with a  bit of email activity we agreed that a co-signed letter about our intentions around the mortgage and future ownership of the house was all that was required. No lawyer needed. Phew because – and its another mobius strip moment – I can’t afford a lawyer to help me get divorced until Im divorced.

This was the second week we’ve done shared cared – the part when I’m not actually caring for anyone else than me. Shared care is scary on so may levels:

–         will my babies be ok?

–         will he look after my babies?

–         will I be lonely?

–         will I look after myself if I’m not looking after other people?

What I learnt the first few weekends that he had the kids is that I feel down if I don’t have contact with other people. I’m not a very insightful navel gazer but I have learnt it’s important for me to make contact with another and do something otherwise I get grey thoughts.  I am a social creature.

The first weekend I was alone I felt alone. And once I felt lonely like that it was just so hard to ring up friends to see what they were doing. And by that stage it was last minute and hard to arrange things – every ‘rejection’ was hard and after maybe two I felt like I just couldn’t try anymore.

The next kid free weekend I prepared early and had a few things organised to do and then the rest of the time I had alone felt… great. And the kids came home and they were fine and dandy and apart from lost clothes and some things he used to do when he was living here anyway it was all ok. In fact having time with his kids seemed to have the very positive effect that their father was aware of the time and really was present with them.

When the time came to go to week on and week off I had skills to be alone and I was even feeling guilty about looking forward to it.

There is an international film festival on so Ive been able to get to an Iranian one: Persepolis . It was in French and I love French movies with subtitles. Actually I love subtitles cos I love the feeling of being able to follow a language and getting the benefit of hearing its difference sometimes sexy sounding like French and sometimes discordant or just different. Then I saw an Icelandic one. The unfamiliar language was great but this one was particularly interesting for its glimpse into the landscapes of Iceland both rural and urban. So different.

And the weather has been just turning it on with the wind getting stronger and stronger. Its lift the roof, lift up bushes, fly the dog like a kite, rock the car type stuff. Tomorrow the kids are home and we can all cuddle on the couch and watch TV and have a blobby weekend.

My eldest daughter told me she is dreading high school. Its 18 months away – a long time to be in dread mode. I want to say don’t bother yourself with that yet – wait till the week before you go! I don’t like the idea of her carrying fear.

But I understand fearing change, losing what is known and the chasm of the unknown. As much as I rationalise my fear as an adult I still feel it.

Im not kidding the lawn got to be knee high. Going to the compost heap was a bush beating exercise.  I had given up on all the people I’d asked to cut it and I was sick of borrowing the people-down-the-road-I-don’t-knows mower. One reason is I hate being beholden to people. It’s awkward and icky. As if to completely prove this point they legitimately asked me if Id look after their cat while they were away. It turned out to be a lot to do with runny cat poos ewwwwwwww and this just made me think no way did I want to end up feeling like I owed them in the future!

Nice people but very incontinent cat.

Anyhow just as I was resolved to planting trees haphazzardly and kissing the lawn idea goodbye completely I was visiting a friend when her lawn guy turned up. She explained to me he was completely unreliable but what I saw was a lawn guy who was ACTUALLY THERE.

I drew him a map to my place, explained the dog, explained where I’d put teh money and 10 days later, early one morning Im making my porridge and staring out the back window and I see it – a short lawn!

Woo hoo. On closer inspection I see why people mow regularly – over time the grass has kinda clumped and huddled together and gotten more bristly but … it was never a great lawn anyway. I wonder if the lawn guy also does lawyering? I want a blunt cut there too….