Let’s talk straight up – one Single Mom to another here. This IS the single mom column, right? Because it’s Friday evening and I need a plan.
I’m sitting here watching the clock slowly tick away the minutes toward bedtime for my middle child and doing my best not to panic. It’s my weekend with the kids and I’m not prepared for it at all this time. I’ve got three children and right there, that’s enough to send any parent, single or not, into a tailspin on a Friday evening without a solid weekend plan.
But allow to me elaborate here – these are not your “Saved By The Bell”, “Eight Is Enough” kind of children that live in my house. No. The details are complicated but for now let’s just use Calvin & Hobbes, Dennis the Menace and Home Alone as your visual aids.….our household is anything but ordinary. It’s mostly fun and with nary a dull moment, but who wants to admit that the thought of 48+ straight parenting hours with their offspring has them wishing for the last stroke of Sunday evening bedtime at 5pm on Friday? So just add a nice dose of mom guilt to the unpreparedness and the ever-growing feeling of dread as I sit here, 20 minutes later, still no farther into the weekend plans than I was when I started this paragraph.
Plans are important because we don’t do spontaneity well. We are the sort of people who need routine – we need to know what to expect and when to expect it. A whole day of open ended fun might sound like a great idea at 8am but by 12pm the evidence clearly points to what a serious error in judgment that was yet again. Planning is fundamental to our survival and I’ve seriously dropped the ball this time.
It also helps me keep my sanity while I’m trying to balance my often obsessive need to maintain a home that suggests I might still know how to vacuum and wash clothes while still showing my children the attention they need and deserve. And even with a plan in place, there is never anyone else around to plunge the toilet when I’m playing Jenga with Child A when Child B comes flying down the hallway with those dreaded words on his lips – “Mom, the toilet…..”
Something is always put on hold around here, which is just regular parenting of any sort. But even more-so than the house itself is balancing one child with another – there’s nobody to back me up when Child B needs the toilet plunged (again – can’t he figure out how much paper to use?) and while I’m making my way back to the Jenga game, Child C has some sort of crisis involving a video game cheat code that he’s lost and the world will END if he doesn’t find it. By the time I return to the Jenga game, Child A has used the blocks to build a bridge to Neverland and is no longer interested in the game, or in me.
And so it goes, around and around again. Someone please remind me why cloning is an ethical issue because this whole “there’s just one of me to go around” bit is more than worn out by now.
At the end of all of this I still have no solid plan for the weekend, but I do have a few ideas and that will have to suffice. And if toilet-plunging becomes a part of this particular weekend, so be it. But let’s hope not – I could really use a weekend without that.
Bethany Parker is a mom to 3 really cool boys, a Champaign native since 1987 (wow….). I work at a local church, like to play outside and run my household with a finely tuned balance of free range and structured parenting. In between working, parenting and vacuuming l like to read, force my way through a 20-minute workout or enjoy a good movie at the Art Theater.