If I'm Angry This Must Be September
And other realities when a spouse travels for work
When our youngest child was two years old, Ed got a job that took him to the Yukon Territory for six months every year, starting in about April or May, and ending with the first heavy snowfall in October. He did that for a decade, and when he left the first time, I was writing my first book, parenting a two and a six year old, and using the parenting as an excuse not to write. By September in those early years, I was spitting mad. I hadn’t signed up for that sh*& when we married and promised never to let work take us away from each other for more than two weeks at a time, and yet he was spending every day with people while I was lucky to see anyone other than my kids once or twice a week. Obviously, the rational part of my brain was grateful that one of us could earn enough so that the other one could raise our kids, but solo parenting is hard, and by September, my rational brain was no longer in the building, and not even the start of the new school year could throw open the doors to usher it back in.
So I came up with some coping strategies that allowed me to write, to keep most of my sense of humor, and to eventually avoid the September rage. Obviously these strategies got easier as the kids got bigger, but employing them definitely shaped both my parenting and my partnering.
1. My house was allowed to be dusty. I can’t work in a cluttered space so it was always picked up, but the kind of deep cleaning a house requires was far too easy to become an excuse for not writing. A good friend advised me that as long as my kids were fed and safe, nothing else was so important that it couldn’t wait until the writing was done.
2. We became very picky about extracurricular activities. If it required my time or my driving, it had to be something that kid really wanted to do. If there was any complaint of “I don’t want to go to practice” or whatever, that was it, we were done. I was a person with a life too, and I refused to completely subsume my identity to theirs, or my work to their father’s.
3. That being said, I couldn’t have done it without Ed’s Mom as my occasional co-parent. There were many times when a robotics tournament took me and the eldest child away for the whole day, so the youngest would get a Grammy sleepover, and for the first several years of the youngest’s bagpiping journey, we all met at her house for his lessons. She and I developed a habit of two dinners a week together, with kids joining us to eat and for whatever conversation they were willing to contribute, but otherwise the evening was ours to catch up, connect, and develop the friendship that is uniquely ours.
4. Food flexibility encouraged foraging and self-sufficience. First of all, breakfast for dinner is absolutely a thing, and it requires almost no thought or special trips to the grocery store to plan. I’m also still in the habit of mixing up a big batch of pancake batter mix (a camping recipe I got from Sunset Magazine years ago) to keep in a lidded glass container on my shelf of baking supplies. A cup of water or milk, plus an egg and a cup of mix makes enough pancakes for two hungry kids, and leaves extra for cold snacking later. Fruit, smoothie ingredients, vegetables, yogurt, and cereal were also easy snacking material, and the kids became adept at making their own breakfasts and lunches.
5. Summertime meant kids home from school, and my strategy for writing through that time was to retreat to my bedroom and close the door. The family room contained all the Legos, toys, drawing supplies and movies a kid could want, their bedroom had books and a costume box, and outside had nerf guns, the hose, and chalk for the patio. They had to tell me if they were going to a neighbor’s house or using the stove, and I asked them to do a general pick-up before I emerged from my writing cave to make dinner. Inevitably I’d tidy toys when I came out of my room (and hold my tongue about the cleaning if they had left me in peace to write), but they became adept at entertaining each other and themselves without chaos. We all had to build up trust for the arrangement to work – I trusted that they would make good decisions, and they trusted that I’d be there for them if they needed me.
6. Every evening, after it had cooled down, I dragged both kids on a walk with me. They asked what I’d written that day, and then told me which plot points they were interested in. We talked about their day, and made plans to do at least one out-of-the-house thing per week. We always ate dinner together, but those walks were a way to make sure they’d been active, even on the hottest of days.
7. As my kids got older and more interested in video games, we chose things that were multi-player so they would play together. My favorite were the Minecraft LAN worlds – two iPads can wirelessly connect to each other such that both kids could work together to build the same structures. The best digital citizenship lesson my eldest ever got was in a 1:1 iPad pilot program class, when the teacher allowed a group of kids to play Minecraft together on a LAN world. Suddenly, one girl burst into tears, and a shocked boy exclaimed he hadn’t known it was her building that he blew up. The entire group worked together to rebuild the girl’s structure, and I doubt any of them ever forgot that there are real people behind the digital characters who play games.
8. My biggest survival tip for those long stretches of solo parenting was to let go of the unimportant things. Did it matter if my kids wanted to wear the same thing every day for a week? No it did not. Did it matter that they fixed themselves cereal every time they wanted a snack? Not if I made sure dinner was healthy and fruit and vegetables were plentiful. Did I need to make sure they were entertained every day? Emphatically “no.” They understood that the answer to “I’m bored” was always, “Boredom is a failure of imagination,” so they stopped complaining about it, and in return, I made sure to close my computer at least one day a week to go to the beach, or for a walk in the Botanical Gardens - anything that took us out of our usual environment.
Another thing that helped with the long absences was that Ed negotiated for the company to pay for us to visit him for 2-4 weeks every summer instead of him coming home for breaks. That give the kids something to look forward to, me a chance to get out of the routine of being alone with them. Honestly, the company benefited from the continuity of keeping him in the Yukon the whole time, so they didn’t complain about the expense after the first year. Later, when he spent three months in London for post-production each year, I made sure his housing was big enough to accommodate us (a 1-bedroom flat works fine when you move the parents’ bed into the sitting room), and we paid our own way to join him for a couple of weeks. Those travel opportunities were a big consolation to his absences, and were some of our kids’ most prominent memories of those years.
To be clear, it’s never easy to solo parent, no matter how many kids you have or how old they are, just as it’s hard to be the parent missing all the milestones and memories of your kids’ childhood. We do what we need to do to make sure our families work, and when we keep communication lines open, and get creative with the ways we connect, any configuration of family can be workable, and - even in September - wonderful too.