dating widowers

Being a Single Mom


"Under the horse chestnut tree", 1 p...

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I have never pretended that I ever wanted to parent on my own. As a matter of fact when I turned 31, I actually spent a few months comtemplating  single parenthood. Not because it was becoming a trendy thing, but because I really couldn’t imagine not having a child of my own. I came to the conclusion though that it was too daunting a task and much too unfair to a child to go it alone. 

 

Imagine my surprise when the fates went ahead and made a single mom of me anyway.

 

It isn’t that I am not good at it. I am commended right and left for what a wonderful child I have, but I often wonder if they are merely saying that and the unspoken part of the sentence is “for not having a father..” Because the truth is that my little girl is headstrong and spoiled. I have been too distracted and too tired and just too grief-stricken to hold the lines that needed holding as often as they should have been held.

 

Case in point is that she still sleeps with me. She has slept with me almost from the beginning. I am assured by other two parent families that children do sleep with their parents. It is more common than the majority let on and that eventually they all sleep on their own.

 

I feel like a failure nonetheless.

 

Neither I nor any of my siblings ever slept with our parents in their bed. Their bedroom as a matter of fact was strictly off-limits. I have memories of hovering in the doorway to their room and asking to be allowed in. Even in the middle of the night. Even if I was ill. I never even tried to broach the door if I had a bad dream. I would just pull the covers over my head and grip them tightly to prevent whatever monster I had dreamt of from gaining entry.

 

I bring this up only because I worry that this bad habit I have left to its own devices will become more of an issue once the summer comes and we are in Canada with Rob. He is patient when it comes to my parenting skills, but he is far and away the expert. It must take quite a toll on his inner Virgo to tactfully approach subjects concerning my daughter. 

 

We had a semi-conversation about sleeping arrangements tonight on the phone, and although he brought up nothing I hadn’t already thought about, I still felt bad afterwards because I know firsthand that no one was ever meant to do this by themselves.

 

I wonder more often than not who she would be if there had been two of us raising her.

Bats


Fear of Bats?

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Devils Den is actually known for its bats. I didn’t know that even though I did consider it very probable that we would come across bats in the cave we planned to explore while we were there. I decided however not to tell Rob that I am afraid of bats ahead of time. I didn’t want him to think I was going to be a “girl” about similar adventures in the future, and I just thought I could conqueror my fear by not looking up. You don’t look up. You don’t see bats. You are not afraid.

The cave itself has history for Rob. He has been to the park in the past, most recently on his memorial trip for his late wife, Shelley, last November. It was during this trip that he broke his flashlight while back in the cave and, because there is no light source anyway but at the mouth of the cave, he had to feel his way out. It was a profound experience for him.

He “borrowed” the white disposable coveralls we wore from a work site so that we could attempt to go back further in the cave than most of the general population of campers at the park go. To do this you have to climb and crawl and it is damp and muddy. The coveralls were to protect our clothing. Rob may be all guy but he is a Virgo and they just can’t get past their “be overly prepared” natures. Case in point, we did not carry flashlights. He had dropped and broken his in November because it is difficult to carry a light and manage other tasks. So, he found small lamps that we could strap to our heads. They proved to be quite efficient light sources, and Rob loved his so much that by the time we had hiked back down to the road after our caving adventure, he had a small list of activities for which this wonderful new gadget might prove useful.

The cave was somewhat narrow, and it wasn’t long before the coveralls had earned more than their share of “useful” points. When we reached the spot where most people turn back, Rob asked me if I wanted to try and go in further. Surprising even myself, I was game. I didn’t have to be. He would have been fine had I chickened out but I wanted to go on. For him a little, but mostly for myself. I am not claustrophobic at all and since I hadn’t looked up even once, the whole fear of bats had not been an issue, but I am afraid of the dark. I always have been and since by husband’s death last year, it has been worse than it was even when I was a small child. Rob had asked me if I would be okay if we turned out our lamps at some point and I had said yes, but the truth was that I would have been only if he was standing right next to me with both arms wrapped tightly around me. The only time my house is completely dark at night is when there is company staying over after all.

So, up we went. Crawling and contorting and twisting and climbing up and down until we reached a very tight space with very little head room. So little that keeping my eyes off the ceiling was becoming a difficult thing to do as it was practically in my face. That is when I heard Rob tell me to stop. Why? I wondered. Well, I was about to scrap a few bats right off the ceiling with my cap.

I decided I wanted to turn around. I am sure the tone of my voice said everything that I hadn’t earlier. It took a few minutes of carefully directing me to get us turned around and on our way out. It was now that Rob felt the sudden urge to look up himself, and he was amazed enough at the number of bats he saw to comment on them near constantly until we emerged from the cave’s entrance.

I don’t think that he was disappointed in me. He teased me quite a bit, but that is par for the course when he catches me out about something. Anyway, it is not the kind of teasing that I remember from my childhood. It is playful and I can tell he is quite amused by what he refers to as my being “cute”.

I don’t think caving is going to be high on our list of things to do in the wild.

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Writing


A black and white photograph of the Scottish t...

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My four year old loves to write. She will sit with a notebook and pen quietly scratching away in a language that is half letters/half symbols, and I wonder if she is mimicking me through example or DNA. When I was her age my stories were more of the performance art variety, told to invisible audiences via dolls or dance. Although I loved books, it hadn’t occurred to me that my stories could be written down for others to read.

 

I know I have written about this before, but my first written story was about pirates. Sister Rita, a tiny prune-faced thing who was barely taller than the shortest fourth grader and painted her meticulously filed nails bright colors that I am sure the Pope would have disapproved of, took the red pen that all teachers must have been issued with their licenses back then and buried my artistic endeavor under editing marks she never taught us the meaning of. If I had not been born a writer that might have been the end of my authoring days but for the fact that Sister aside, people liked to read what I wrote.

 

I began to write obsessively in the fifth grade.  Writing filled up the days while I was waiting for the other kids to “get it” so we could move on and was a way for me to look productive while I hid from the subjects that bored or perplexed me.

 

By high school, when the education process had progressed from the merely tedious to a test of my endurance, the idea that I could build a life and even make a living from writing was starting to take hold and was probably one of the bigger reasons I ended up in college. I thought, incorrectly as it turned out, that I could learn how to be a writer there.

 

University is a piss poor place to learn about writing much less become an author. Long story short, I became an English teacher instead. An English teacher who knew less than zero about grammar and couldn’t spell.

 

It was teaching grammar to thirteen year olds (who had no idea I was a mere chapter ahead of them every day) that taught me to love the language as much as I loved to see myself think on paper. But I still wasn’t a writer.

 

Ironically, it was graduate school that made me  focus on my writing  again. By treating it as a craft, I had many opportunities to test my abilities in an impartial setting . That and watching someone I loved beyond logic die right in front of me for months and years finally tipped the scales. I guess that is why the Palahnuik quote jumped off the page at me. I became a teacher only partly because I loved it. The other reason had to do with losing my confidence in myself and my gift and succumbing to the idea that one’s life work is about security not passion.

 

I began to blog about six months or so after my husband, Will, died. It was much the same as the writing that I had done as a teenager. Just thinking on “paper” but now I was very conscious of the process and the  idea of writing as a life began to flicker.

 

It was Rob who fanned the flames again and continues to do so. I think he will understand the quote, and the photo as well.

 

I envy those who can do what they love from the beginning.