Top 10 Reasons Being a Single Mom is AWESOME

10. No other adult around to make fun of me when I dance the Hot Dog, sing the theme song to Little Einsteins, or cry at the end of Meet the Robinsons, Lady and the Tramp, or pretty much any sappy movie.

9. I OWN THE REMOTES. All of them. I can flip through the channels all day long, watch Animal Planet, or any chick flick I desire with zero complaints. Once the boy goes to bed of course. Prior to that, he owns the remotes. Must be a genetic thing.

8. When I say I have a headache, it means I have a headache. It's not super secret code.

7. If I announce we are having cereal for dinner, it is met with clapping and happy smiles.

6. I always know who left the dishes in the sink or forgot to take out the garbage. That would be me, on both counts.

5. No one complains when I don't have time to shave my legs.

4. The feeling of accomplishment and pride that I take care of my son and provide for him physically, financially and emotionally. He is happy, loving, sensitive, amazing - and does not show any signs of having the predisposition to torture small animals, be a date rapist, or raid the pension funds of the people that work at his company due to his "domineering" mother.

3. When The Boy goes to bed, that's my time to do whatever. Read, watch bad tv, chat with my girlfriends, catch up with work, go to sleep early...I have much more "me" time than most of my married friends seem to.

2. Not having to argue or compromise my parenting beliefs with someone in order to be "fair". I do what I think is best. Period.

1. The special bond I have with The Boy. He is my buddy, my muse, my heart, my soul. The music I hum when no one else is listening. We are a team, partners, and I hope someday when he is older, we will be friends. For now, I am just Mommy, and that is more than fine with me.

Quick Hobby Update

Cup-A-Cakes: Still no interest, but those pesky teachers I fed are after me to make more. They all want my recipes, which I didn't write down at all, and keep saying I should sell them. I don't want to sell them, so need to figure out what I did and write it down before I get suckered into making more cupcakes!

Birds: I just filled up the bird feeders this morning. Again. They are being swarmed by sparrows and starlings. Even my almost 3 year old reports to me "those birds make a big mess". He was incredibly excited to see a squirrel out there eating what fell on the ground. I did see a squirrel feeder, but managed to hold onto my credit card and didn't purchase. He was even MORE excited to see a cat laying in wait, behind the playhouse, watching the birds. We could have an episode of Wild Kingdom right on my patio before the week is over.

State quarters: I spent his quarters on tolls. Thank goodness!

Will You Be My Facebook Daughter?

I recently had a falling out with my father. I finally, after 30 years of being treated like crap by my vile step-mother (hereafter ever known as "VSM"), told her I had had enough of her passive aggressive bs, and that I wasn't going to allow or tolerate her treating my son the way she had treated me.

My father said he didn't want to see, speak or hear from me until I apologized to his wife. Uh-huh. That was right before Christmas, and aside from an unfortunate funeral 2 weeks ago, he hasn't seen, spoken or heard from me in that time.

But today my friends, today he requested me to be his Facebook friend. I have struggled on if I should accept numerous Fbook friend requests: the girl that made my sophomore year of high school miserable (accepted, went through her profile, then deleted her), numerous ex-boyfriends (kept some, ignored others), people that I "wasn't really friends with but didn't really talk to" in high school (accepted but deleted a lot of them, realized I didn't ever talk to them because they were BORING). But a request to be my own father's Facebook daughter? Is this really what life is becoming? We can't be relatives in real life, but we can be Facebook peeps?
So what to do, what to do? I haven't accepted it, but haven't ignored it. I considered ignoring it and then blocking him, but that just seems so passive aggressive and not my style. So it's just kind of sitting there, unacknowledged. Which maybe is the best way to deal with him. He chose to not acknowledge me most of my life, so now he cannot exist in my Facebook world. He doesn't get to look at pictures, read my status, "like" my activity if he doesn't want to deal with the IRL part of the equation.

And as for VSM; if she ever shows up on Facebook, I might have to block her.

Dirty Little Secret

I have a secret: I don't want to be a stay at home (SAHM). Was reading a blog that a friend recommended, and the first post I read was an excerpt of someone else's blog -- so while not written by the author of the original blog I was directed to, the writer applauded this woman's decisions & parenting philosophy...

I have wanted to be a stay-at-home mom for as long as I can remember. I even majored in "Home and Family" for crying in the night! And let me tell you something, this life is better than I ever imagined it could be.  I take my title of "stay-at-home mom" quite literally. I try to stay at home with my kids as much as possible.  I am the lucky mother of 3 adorably perfect children. (I can say that because I am their mother.) Mabel, my oldest, is only 6, so my experience as a mother is somewhat limited. But as my children have grown, I have begun to realize that it is my job as a stay-at-home mom to create an environment that allows them to thrive. For me and my family, that means a slow-paced, home-centered existence.

My goal is to create a life for my kids that is peaceful and calm.

There is a lot of noise out there in the world. I want my home to be a refuge, a haven, and a place where that near deafening sound can be ignored for another day. As a stay-at-home mother, the home is my only domain, it is my favorite place to be, and I want it to be my children's, too.

Let me comment, first, on the fact that the author uses the phrase, "for crying in the night". What does that mean? I had to read it multiple times to figure out she wasn't talking about newborns and that she didn't want to use the phrase, "for crying out loud". I wasn't aware that the latter was a dirty word worthy of George Carlin's infamous list. I also just became a facebook fan of the group "Smart, Educated, Sophisticated Women who say 'Fuck' a lot", so maybe I am not the best judge of colorful language. But really. For crying in the night? There would be crying in the night if all I did was stay home.

I have to just say it, because really, since no one reads this, it's not like anyone is going to judge me...I think she is Weird. And that is 'weird' with a capital 'W'. Not only because she named her daughter Mabel, which is a little odd in and of itself, but because she tries to stay home as much as possible. Are you keying on the weirdness yet? Are you wondering if she is FLDS? Cause I am.

"My goal is to create a life for my kids that is peaceful and calm." Oh really? You mean your goals aren't to create a life for your kids that is chaotic and angry? Bad mommy. Bad. My goal for my kid is to create a life that gives him the skills he needs to live, unassisted by me, when I am gone. Hopefully to live unassisted by me well before I am gone, actually, at around 21 or 22, when he graduates college. And that means dealing with the messes. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't have a routine, because we do. Doesn't mean that there is rampant shouting, fighting and craziness around here; quite the contrary actually. But I am not striving for our home to be The Fortress of Solitude either. Life is messy. Live it. Love it. Embrace it.

Here are her other tips:

• I take my title of "stay-at-home mom" quite literally. I try to stay at home with my kids as much as possible. On the days that errands simply can't be ignored, get them done quickly and early in the day. This allows for an afternoon of relaxation spent at home, not fighting traffic and the hustle and bustle of shops.

The hustle and bustle of shops? Where do they live, Walnut Grove?

• Limit outside activities. Call me crazy, but I really believe that quantity is more important than quality.

I call her crazy and raise her a cuckoo-bird.

• Eat dinner together as a family every night. It doesn't always have to be a spectacular meal, but this is a good habit to start. A couple years ago, I read an article in Time Magazine called The Magic of the Family Meal. In it, I learned a few things, like the fact that young children pick up vocabulary and a sense of how conversation is structured during family dinners. They hear how a problem is solved, learn to listen to other people's concerns, and respect their tastes. They learn to share. Family dinners give kids a sense of belonging to their family. This is where a family builds its identity and culture. Legends are passed down, jokes rendered, eventually the wider world examined through the lens of a family's values. Not to mention that families who eat dinner together tend to eat much healthier.

This is actually one I agree with - I do think it's important to try to eat dinner together. Of course in my house the conversations were rather one-sided the first, say 2.5 years of my son's life; maybe THAT is why he didn't start talking until he was well over 28 months old. I also grew up from around 9th grade on eating dinner alone most nights, since my parents didn't get home from work until after 7. While it taught me to cook, it was a little lonely.

• Keep things clean. In order to maintain a peaceful home, I really believe you have to have a clean home. Some days I feel like I spend my life cleaning. Other days I feel like my house is a major disaster area and there's no hope. But for the most part, I try to stick to a cleaning schedule (Mondays I do bathrooms, Tuesdays I dust, etc.). This keeps my neat-freak tendencies in check, and it means that I always have a relatively clean house.

I don't want to have a dirty house. More than that, I don't ever, ever, EVER want to feel like I spend my life cleaning. So I work and have a cleaning lady come every 2 weeks. When I get promoted to VP, or when I can stop paying $1200/month for full-time child care, I plan to make that a weekly visit from the cleaning fairy and never take the garbage out again. It's important to have goals, and this is one of mine.

The other main reason, aside from the fact that we would have no home for me stay at if I wasn't bringing home the bacon, that I could never stay home is that I get a little weird when left with too much unstructured time on my hands. For example - over the last 2 weeks, here is what new hobbies I developed:

1. Inventing new cupcakes. But it's a cup-A-cake; a cupcake in a cup. Get it? All the yummy deliciousness of a cupcake, in the convenience of a cup. So you can eat it with a spoon.  I made Caramel Apple Pie cupcakes - they were delicious, I brought them to my son's school in my continued effort to be the most favorite mom, and the loved them. Next on the list are Peanut Butter Cup Cupcakes and Mounds Bar Cupcakes. Oh wait, I bought all of the ingredients, but have already lost interest. Yawn. (ADHD, remember?
2. Feeding the birds. It started out harmless enough. I bought a $3.99 birdfeeder, one of those shepherd poles, a bag of birdseed and fed the birds this winter. It was kind of boring, but E like to watch them out of the kitchen window, and they were kind of cute. Then spring came. And I bought a second set up for the back yard, and lo and behold, I am like the crazy bird lady now. Not only have I started identifying the little tweeters by running to google to look them up, I am going through a whole friggin tube of birdseed every 2 days in the backyard. The little pigs, I mean finches, eat their own weight x 20 on a daily basis. But I really like them, so I stock up. And spend a lot of time staring at more expensive, prettier bird feeders than my $3.99 Home Depot special. And looking at bird baths.
3. Collecting state quarters. Yes, I decided that it's critically important for my son to have a quarter for every state. I actually just thought of this about 45 mins ago while rifling through change to buy a cup of coffee. Am hoping this goes by way of the cupcakes very soon.

As you can see by the above examples, if I had too much additional time on my hands, lord only knows what kind of mischief I would be into. How many half-started craft projects, half-assed hobbies, and how much MONEY I would be spending in my pursuit of quantity over quality.

Oh, and how could I forget - I blog now, too.

Starting Over

Here I am again, deciding that the ideas & thoughts that bounce through my head are just so compelling, that of course I must share them with the universe. I am certainly not a gifted writer; I often use bad grammar, bad punctuation and from writing so many work emails, I have become overly fond of the bulleted list and writing in sentence fragments to get my point across. It reminds me of when in I was in my last year of college, I decided that the deep and profound meaning I was finding in commercials and late night television should be - no wait, NEEDED to be - shared with the world; or at least with my journal. Let's just say that was the Summer of Love. I lived in a t-shirt, cut-offs and flip flops, wore my very long hair pulled pack in a bandanna kerchief style, big old gypsy hoop earrings, and stopped wearing a bra. I did still shave though. Finding my journal from that time when moving several years later was a riot. I mean really -- what was I THINKING? In between rants on the misogynistic world and the deeply unappreciated talent of Liz Phair, I also took the time to expound, prolifically, about natural disasters being mother nature's way of "shaking the fleas off her back". Yes, we were predators. We had overpopulated, and she was coming to take us out and reclaim some open space. The herd was being winnowed it. You get the idea...pages and pages of metaphors for trying to understand tragedy. To trying to believe that there is a higher purposed for when bad things happen, and not that sometimes it truly is that sucky things happen to good people. Welcome to life.

So some 15 years later, here I am, back again, to share my ADHD torrent of ideas - I bounce more than rubber ball some days. I am older, wiser, and generally more responsible. I definitely wear a bra, often underneath a dress or suit at my corporate job. I still love my cut offs, but they don't love me back anymore so I stick with yoga pants or jeans for the weekend uniform. I have a great career, a nice house, absentee family, loser ex-husband, 11 year old dog, and one amazing, gorgeous, wonderfully precocious almost 3 year old son, who shall be known here as "The Boy", who is the reason I get up every day with a smile and hope for this life and this world that we live in. Raising him alone is both terrifying and satisfying; selfishly I love having him pretty much all to myself. We're buds. We're playmates. We're a team. Arguably I do more work and provide for us, but he IS only almost 3, so I cut him some slack.

So how did I name this blog and what is it about? Well, lots of the other names I wanted were taken, so I was getting annoyed, and thinking about scrapping the whole thing (that ADHD thing again), and then this phrase popped into my head: I don't know how you do it. I could NEVER do what you do. I could NEVER be a single mom...blah blah blah.

I think when people say things like that, they are trying to give me a compliment, and I know that some of my true friends mean it just like that -- they truly GET IT. Trying to acknowledge how much work it is to work FT and raise a child. And it can be a lot some days. Usually what I think is that if they recognize how much effort I expend in a day, then how come no one is ever offering to help a girl out once in a while? But sometimes when people say it, I get this flash of anger followed up with deep annoyance. I find it annoying when people, women usually, men normally don't give a shit how much you do in a day, especially since their wife is usually doing the same and they don't help very much, act like I am doing something akin to lifting a car off my trapped child after an 18-car pile up on Rt 80. I wonder if they really think they couldn't do it, or if they are just saying that because they think it's polite. Or because they secretly feel sorry for me that I don't have a husband around making extra dishes and fixing things. Or maybe they are just absentmindedly giving a response because they really don't give a shit. But do these women; these smart, intelligent women, really think that they couldn't care for their child if they had to? I find that difficult to believe. OF COURSE they could care for their child(ren). Maybe it's the whole package - the financial part, the emotional part, the having to be EVERYTHING to another small person: a good provider, a good role model, a helper of homework, fixer of boo-boos, putter together of crazy children's toys. All of that. I know they could do it, deep down the know they could do it.

So this is my story. Sometimes it's sad, most times it's a little mundane, often funny, and filled with love.