Understanding married mothers who are parenting alone

Married or taken, you’ve been doing this alone.

To all the moms out there who are taken, but live like they are single. You know who you are. You have a partner, a spouse, someone you parent with – when they are home. When your significant other is gone more than half the time, parenting takes on a whole new look.

There’s a variety of us out there – stay at home moms and working moms are only two common terms used to describe us, but they entail SO MUCH MORE. Now let’s add in our partner – boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, co-parent – whatever, our partner that has (we’ll use his to reflect my own situation) a job that takes him away. Could be the oil fields, military, anything really – but it takes them away from us. My husband is a consultant in Higher Education. This means he leaves to a new university each week to work on incorporating his company’s software into their system. He’s been doing this for 10 years now.

His original schedule was supposed to be travel 3 weeks, work from home 1. Now it’s all over the place. We stay with it because he’s good at it; he excels, but it gets HARD! I don’t hear from him during the day. I’m lucky if I get 15 minutes throughout the entire day. And forget those work dinners – nope, not gonna hear from him then either.

#Singlewifelife is a term I felt best describes my situation. Some friends felt I was being dismissive of single mothers – truly single mothers who work hard and do everything in their power to stay afloat. No. I have several friends who are single mothers. I do everything I can to understand and support them. I hope to never be in their shoes and am in awe of their strength. But words must be taken in context. Single and wife are obviously juxtaposed together and are opposites. This is on purpose. So…..context.

Single wife life can be for any mother trying to raise her humans and not have that extra support around.

We are dismissed because it can’t be as hard as being a single mother.

It must be nice to have the whole bed to ourselves at night.

We must relax at home and paint our nails while the children are at school.

We couldn’t have any medical issues preventing us from living as our best selves.

We must be able to do what we want with the house.

We must be able to have friends over whenever we want.

Why would the kids stress us out? We’ve been relaxing all day.

Why would being a single wife be hard? Because we’re still moms!!! Being a mom is hard no matter what situation you are in! Dismissing the difficulties that come from parenting by yourself is the same as dismissing my feelings towards infertility because “at least I had one”.

NO ladies. It’s still hard.

We don’t get the bed to ourselves at night because at least one of the children, sometimes all of them, will wake up throughout the night and demand your love and help getting back to sleep. Or getting a drink. Or going to the bathroom. Or rubbing their leg cramps, cleaning up throw up, soothing nightmares, and so on! And if we’re really lucky, we get to do this several times a night and no amount of caffeine the next day will help.

Even if we do get the bed to ourselves, maybe just once in a while, it would be nice to snuggle in close to the man who makes you feel safe instead of a cold side of the bed.

We don’t get to relax at home. Even if all the kids are at school, someone has to do the laundry, plan meals, pay bills, clean and do yard work. Don’t forget to add in those extra things like pets or doctor appointments. Heaven forbid you take ten minutes to yourself and read.

And if those kids are still at home, we don’t get to shower. Ever. And if we do, it’s on a dare. It’s knowing that those kids will come into the bathroom a million times and get into everything they aren’t supposed to. The toddler can reach your phone. Too bad for your phone. Now you see if you can get out of the shower before she cracks the screen or Marco Polo’s your naked self to the world. When you get out of the shower, you take note of the emptied box of cereal on the floor and the smashed Cheez-its on the carpet. How’d they even reach the Cheez-its?

How does the world tell us to take a shower? Oh right, get up earlier. Because we didn’t already cover the sleepless nights. What? Wait til they are asleep? Oh – if we have ANY energy left at the end of the day, maybe we’ll consider that. But it’s still a dare since the little humans like to wake up not long after being put down and no amount of cry it out will help some children.

Paint our nails? I’ve been wanting to for the last month!

And those ever important friends so crucial to our sanity? Well, them coming over only works if our lives don’t feel like total chaos at that moment. And of course them coming over relies on their schedule and families as well. Adulting just isn’t that simple.

Ladies – let’s not make this post longer than it needs to be. My children cry and scream throughout the day. They beg to be held and comforted constantly. Of course I love the moments that we can afford to cuddle and be together – but someone has to make dinner. Someone has to get up and do all the things that need doing and that is hard when you have a sad screaming toddler clinging to your leg.

I have woken up tired of the day in front of me. I have ignored laundry for weeks because dishes or children were more important. I have cried out of pure frustration because I don’t know how to get my son to his activities at night while my daughters are asleep. I have cried because I have a teenager who instead of looking at the dishes on the table as “wow mom must be tired”, he looks at them as “mom never does what she tells me to do”. I have a toddler who doesn’t talk and screams in frustration pretty much all the time.

Single wives, what people don’t see is all the planning we have to do in order to take care of our kids. Even though we have a partner somewhere, we are still having to act as both parents. Some of us work, and some don’t, but no matter what, we are working to exhaustion and no one else but one of us understands.

Your tears don’t mean less because you have a partner. Your frustration and anger is not unjustified. Your loneliness still makes sense. Fellow single wives – I see you. I understand.