As I sit here with my coffee, five days before my 9 year old son begins fourth grade, I am thinking about my life as I know it: a single parent, pretty much singlehandedly raising my son (alone) and that my big picture just a short 10 years ago did NOT include my life as it is right now.
I saw the movie Julie and Julia a few nights ago about a woman who decided to cook her way through Julia Child's cookbook "Mastering The Art of French Cooking." The movie's character, Julie Powell, had always been chided about never finishing something she started. I connected with this character on a sub-level: I have six or seven unfinished novels in my computer. I lie in bed at night and write chapters in my head - good, solid, chapters to capture readers' attentions and propel them into turning the pages of my book long into the wee hours of the morning. But then my alarm goes off and I am startled awake by reality and those solid chapters fade away like the dreams I had during my sleep. I WANT to finish just one and I BELIEVE that I will but the question is when?
Single parenting is like searching for the elusive giant squid - it exists, surely, but trying to capture it to study is nearly impossible. There are no fullproof books on single parenting because there is nothing fullproof about parenting, period. I just made it up as I went along. And nothing prepares you for the fear (the kind of fear that the universe is going to collapse right on top of your head with all the weight of the planets, galaxies, etc. ) that you experience being a single parent. The basic five questions that start with "who, what, where, when and why" become quadrupled by about 40 billion. Congratulations: You suddenly have become responsible for another living, breathing human being that depends on you for all of its life's needs/wants/desires 24/7, 365 and within five years, you lose your identity - your first name has morphed into two names but names that have infinite staying power: I am now known as "Jake's Mom."
Funny, though. As someone who never envisioned herself having children because my father was (and remains) such a lousy role model, for someone whose mother gave passivity an entirely new meaning but has since become a force to be reckoned with at 78 years old, I honestly didn't think I'd be a candidate for the position of mom. Now, however, a mere 9 years later (and one nightmare of a pregnancy), I am now convinced that (a) my son is here for a specific reason TBD; and (b) he is my greatest accomplishment. I still live with that universal collapse fear every day but I've dodged enough incoming destructive asteroids that I now believe I can handle this job fairly well. OK, well, passably well. I'm not about to cook my way through Julia Child's book but those book chapters in my head are in a file drawer somewhere in my brain just waiting to be opened and written down. For now, this blog suffices as my creative outlet.
Tomorrow: Choices.
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