Alone

Being a parent is hard, ask anyone that has done it. You question your words and actions all the time because you are unsure about whether you are doing the right thing in terms of raising your children. There is no one that will teach you how to be a great parent. Yes, of course there are always people who want to give you parenting advice, whether you have asked for it or not, but how can you tell if their advice is the right advice to take?

Being a single parent is even harder and fraught with worry and concern about what you are doing. Ever been stood in a room full of people and you can hear the noise around you, yet you feel so lonely and wonder what you are doing there and what you should say or do next. Well imagine that feeling multiplied by a hundred and it may come close to how lonely it can be raising children alone. At least with two parents you have someone else there to bounce ideas off, ask them if what you just did or said was OK and to lean on during the difficult milestones of growth. But when you are raising children alone there is nobody there for you and it is a daunting and lonely process. You spend every day focused solely on your children and making sure that you provide them with enough mental stimulation, physical and emotional support, love, nurturing and the right level of discipline and boundaries. But at the end of the day when the kids are asleep you sit and reflect on the day and begin to dissect everything that happened and question whether you did enough, could have done it better or where you went wrong. You spend nights crying in bed, mornings crying in the shower so that your babies don’t realize the strain you are under or the pressure that comes with being a single parent. You have this gut-wrenching fear that having one parent will somehow damage them and therefore you can’t afford to let them see that you are human, that you struggle and worry about them. This often crippling fear and anxiety causes you to over-react, become over-protective or smother them in love and affection, but what else can you do? When the boys were small I thought it was hard, having two children under the age of 2 and finding the time to do everything on a daily basis, provide for them, work, maintain a house and somehow retain my own sanity. But you get through it, because one thing I have learned is that you never realize how strong you are until there is no other option than to be strong, at least in front of them and the rest of the world. At different intervals you worry that you are not working hard enough to provide for them and simultaneously worry that you are working too hard and don’t devote enough time to them. Self-doubt, coupled with putting yourself at the bottom of your to-do-list means that there are days, weeks and months when you are exhausted and your own needs are never met. Sometimes you wonder if you should ask for help or support but you want to prove that you can do it all, after all you see other mothers being superwoman, so what’s the problem? The problem is that we never see what others are going through, what internal battles they are fighting so comparisons are never helpful yet we continue to torture ourselves with them. As your children grow up you think that it will get easier, but sadly you have small problems with small children, big problems with big children. The one thing I have learned and I often wish I could have known this from the beginning, is I can only do my best and there is no weakness in asking for support. I am not superwoman, nor will I ever be, so why criticize myself and put myself through that. If I am doing my best and giving my children all that I can then I have done my job, but if I don’t also take care of me then how can I ever hope to take care of them.

Yes I am on my own raising two boys into grown men, but I am far from alone because whether I utilize them or not I have a great support system and my weakness comes not from their use but rather from ignoring their existence.