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.