Today marks ten years since life dramatically changed course and I became a lone parent.
I remember Shane coming home late from work. I remember listening to Bat for Lashes when he nonchalantly asked did I really see us together ten years from now. A question I thought never needed asking, a question I’d answered four years before when I blubbered my way through vows, solemn and starry eyed.
But here began his amendment. I couldn’t breathe, except I did breathe, deep belly breaths, oxygen enough for self and the four month baby kicking my ribs from within. The planned pregnancy, in large part by him.
Through streams of hot and confused tears I said “If you don’t see us together then, what are we doing now!?”
He replied “that‘s a good question” and that night he slept on the sofa. I remember scrambling over to that sofa in the middle of the night and waking him, panicked, asking what was going on, how was this happening, I can’t, I couldn’t. But my questioning woke our one year old. As I heard her stir from the next room, I fell to the floor and screamed “my wee girl”. Broken for how the unfolding of this conversation was to impact her life.
Dramatic. I eye roll and think now, a decade on, with the events piled on top of each other so high that this first sequence seems small, maybe inevitable.
But it didn’t then. I was thrust into a life not of my own making. A life so different than I’d planned. And in truth it has continued in that stream. Would I have chosen to live in this town, to spend 6 years working in admin, to continually reach points in relationships where my first priority as parent goes at loggerheads with the life a partner wants? Nope, the optimistic 20 year old who wanted to travel and study and have a career, still aggravates me from within, unsettling the gratitude I feel, and want to feel, for the life, town, job, home, family I have at hand.
I remember, mid way into this decade, reading the prophecy personally : “truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." I’m sure the apostle was not writing about the sudden, involuntary, life of lone parenthood, but it resonated with such a life nonetheless. Freedom of choice has become an internal concern, of thought and feeling. I am the captain of that ship, sometimes.
The loss of him, that became grief three and a half years later, multiplies each year as the kids grow, the ‘content’ of all that is them expanding and impacting the universe with each of their thoughts, words and deeds. I give little concern to the notion of an afterlife but occasionally it floors me that I may never witness his joy in our little people nor his reassurance that my parenting is enough. No reassurance is possible and yet I proceed in doubt and hope.
When he asked if I saw us together ten years from then the question seemed ludicrous, I could not have fathomed another way. I imagined myself half a person without him.
But here I am exactly ten years later, having grown the other half of myself, my opinionated, insubordinate, blundering ‘daemon’ self, so full of my own will that it’s sometimes embarrassing. I can stare myself down and wish so much of her away. But I’m stuck with her, she was with me that night listening to Bat for Lashes and, like it or not, with me for the next ten years. Self partnering is a pretentious term for a very real thing. I am my only guarantee, till death parts us. I should really pay her a compliment every now and then.
Happy 10th Anniversary. You're doing alright.
