Being a single parent through the first three months

Started 16 December 2024 · 19 replies · 194 hearts · read 1.9k times

BexPlymouth, UK · 16 December 2024

1.6 years ago

Being a single parent through the first three months — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

Practical question, and possibly a silly one.

The thing I have not been able to find anywhere is how people manage this when the week has no fixed shape at all.

Every piece of advice I read appears to have been written for somebody with a completely different week from mine, so I am asking people whose weeks look like this.

To be precise about it, since I have put it in the title: three months. I counted rather than guessed, because a guess would have been kinder to me.

Thank you. This circle has solved four practical problems for me already and I am hoping for a fifth.

PipBristol, UK

Cooking for a household while my own appetite had gone somewhere else was the practical problem nobody had prepared me for.

8me too 7

OrphBath, UK

Coming back to say the household adjusted, that nobody noticed as much as I feared, and that dinner is once again just dinner.

LuPreston, UK

My experience is that the logistics settled at about six months and everything since has been ordinary parenting, which is difficult enough on its own.

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK

Noticing the drift towards what other people ought to be doing. We can describe our own arrangements and that is the whole of our authority.

CarlMiddlesbrough, UK

Something practical: I do the cooking earlier and eat later. It costs me nothing and it removed the daily friction entirely.

PoppyLeeds, UK

Wren said something I want to sit with for a second.

The evening meal was the hard one. Everybody else hungry at six and me not hungry until nine, and it took a year to find a workable shape.

SindriReykjavík, IS

Building on what Carl wrote rather than answering the original question.

What I have been careful about is not making my eating a topic at the table. My children do not need a running commentary on any of this.

NanNeath, UK

You have said something a lot of us have not managed to. Thank you.

BramwellNottingham, UK

My weekends are the difficult ones because the structure is gone, and I have had to build a very loose one deliberately.

SalmaManchester, UK

#10

Gently disagreeing with Sindri, or rather adding the other half of it.

What surprised me was how much my patience improved once the tiredness lifted, and how much of parenting is just having enough patience.

TasnimBradford, UK

#11

Something I got right was not changing anything about what my children eat. This is mine and it does not need to become theirs.

NualaArmagh, NI

#12

Salma, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

The lunchbox negotiation and my own appetite were unrelated problems and I kept accidentally treating them as one.

OrvalWinnipeg, CA

#13

Gently disagreeing with Nuala, or rather adding the other half of it.

I found the exhaustion harder to manage than anything, because there is no version of a school morning that waits for you.

11me too 9

ZenBristol, UK

#14

What helped was letting standards drop for a season. Three months of very simple food and nobody suffered and I recovered.

NemoneLewes, UK

#15

My children have never asked and I have never explained, and if they do ask I have a short answer ready that I have practised.

MarkCoventry, UK

#16

The thing I would say to a new parent here is that this is genuinely harder with small children and you are not doing it badly.

HannahSheffield, UK

#17

Somebody suggested keeping something easy in the freezer for the evenings I have nothing, and it has saved me perhaps thirty difficult nights.

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK

#18

Facilitator note: nothing in this circle is medical advice and the practical arrangements still need agreeing with whoever prescribes for you.

17me too 3

OskarWarsaw, PL

#19

Building on what Wren wrote rather than answering the original question.

I did not tell my family for four months and then told them all at once, and I would do it earlier if I could do it again.