Raising kids is hard in the best of situations. When you are a single parent, working hard to put a roof over your head and to put dinner on the table, raising kids can be a grind. I went through this on my own and now my oldest daughter is going through it as well. I did it with three kids for twelve years. At the time it felt like the longest years of my life but I did survive….and luckily so did they.
This past week, I was reminded of how it hard it was. My daughter FaceTimed me on Mother’s Day and I could tell she had been crying. Her two youngest daughters are quite precocious and had gotten into a bottle of red nail polish. When I say they got into it, I mean they got it all over them. It was blood red nail polish and when she first sent me a picture of the mess, it looked like a scene from a serial killer movie.
She was so frustrated, so upset, and while I had to laugh a little inside because you know we all wish the “mother’s curse” on our kids, I had to remember how dang hard it was raising them by myself.
I let her talk then I reminded her of this story:
I was a LVN (Licensed Vocational Nurse) working for $7.49 an hour in 1991 when she and her little brother were about 4 and 2 respectively. I had a part time live in nanny that I could only afford because we lived on the border of Texas and it cost me $50 per week. That was a stretch at times even. One morning I came home after working a 16 hour shift. The nanny went home when I got there and I fed the kids cereal and put them in front of the television with one of their favorite movies. I just wanted about 2 hours sleep.
So I laid down with the door of my bedroom almost shut in our 2 bedroom apartment. I quickly fell asleep from pure exhaustion. A bit later, I hear hysterical laughing from these two children and it woke me from my deep slumber. I went into the living room to see what the commotion was about and they had emptied an entire gigantic Sam’s box of Cheerios on the floor and had danced on it until there was a fine layer of Cheerio dust about 1 inch thick all the way across the floor. Seriously.
I’ve told my daughter this story several times and it is always a funny story now. However, in that moment, I felt so defeated by these little lovely monsters. I was exhausted almost to the point of being ill. I was not well off. That box of cereal probably cost me around $7 at the time (because of the size) and remember that represented one hour of work. I could not afford to replace it at that time and now a whole two weeks worth of breakfast was on the floor.
Now the haters out there may say I was irresponsible to leave them in front of the television…all I can say to that is you are right but take a walk in my shoes….I didn’t have a lot of choices then.
I reminded my daughter to just take pictures of these events and breathe. One day this will be a funny story for her as well. Some of life’s toughest moments evolve to be comedic fodder later down the line. My advice to all single parents….hang in there, enjoy as best as you can, take pictures of everything (good and bad), and breathe. After all, it’s not blood!