There is something to be said for the company of a joyful five-year-old not consumed by anxiety
Ispent much of Friday a week ago — or day one, as it’s now being referred to — in a blind rage. It kicked off that morning, when an acquaintance texted into a Whatsapp group I am in, one with about 30 members. It was one of those messages we were all plagued by for the first few days of this thing, before people (mostly) copped themselves on.
This one was from an anonymous doctor (provenance unknown), urging people to take various measures. Most of it was about children. The vectors.
Towards the end it got to the grandparents and how they could not be expected to babysit. There followed some discussion in the group over how important this was.
Hence my rage. I am a self-employed single mother, supporting my child, and a home, I ranted to the various friends I rang to talk me out of texting into the group itself, something I knew
I would ultimately regret.
My parents do not babysit. What they do is so much more. They are helping us to rear our daughter.
They mind her to an extent that allows me to earn a living. If I was paying an actual childminder, working probably wouldn’t be worth my while financially.
More than that, though: while her father and I co-parent amicably, co-parenting is entirely different to having a spouse. You don’t sit on the couch after bedtime with a co-parent and confide your small anxieties over your child’s welfare. Neither do you go to Ikea or the DIY store together of a Saturday because your child needs a new bed or something in your house needs fixing.
I do these things with my parents — my daughter’s grandparents.
I’m lucky. I’m so supported that sometimes I feel like a fraud calling myself a single parent. In any given week, my parents will be involved in school dropoffs and collections, in bringing my five-year-old to after-school activities hosting playdates, cooking meals, tracking down suddenly needed new sizes of clothing, and doing bedtime. They live five minutes away; my daughter sees them almost every day.
Three years ago, my parents got me through my separation, and made it okay to be a single parent, because I never really felt like one, so supported was I.
What going through a divorce taught me was that you can lose the person you had built a life with, without whom life seemed unimaginable, but that there are still some people in your life who are givens.
What the last week has so shockingly revealed is that sometimes the decision to be there, in your life supporting you, might be out of their hands. Suddenly, we were facing into weeks, maybe months, of isolation from them.
My father has asthma, so I knew immediately, before the Whatsapp groups cranked into action, that we would need to isolate from them. I was raging, because I was so scared.
Everyone going through this has their own particular challenges. I work from home already, so that hasn’t been too much of an adjustment. So far, unlike many of my fellow freelance friends who have, terrifyingly, seen months of work disappear overnight, I’m busy.
But it’s a strange kind of isolation to face into this as the only adult in your house.
And the worries we are all facing can feel that bit more intense: finance, isolation, working from home when the children are there. Some single parents will face isolation from their children, for who knows how long.
The first few days were fine. I realised quite quickly that I had to be strict with myself. Monitor exactly what I was consuming. In ways, it was freeing: muting
Whatsapp groups which threw up links to doom and gloom; not getting back to anything but the absolutely essential stuff.
When my marriage ended I learned that for a time, when you’re in the midst of huge change and lots of grief, you need to make your world really small.
You go off social media at times when you are mentally vulnerable; you take things day by day, hour by hour if you need. Having a child to focus on gives you a purpose, takes you out of your own mind and the potential vortex of anxiety that awaits there, threatening to pull you under.
As the days went on in this past week, I noticed mental buoyancy becoming harder. I didn’t suffer the vicious anxiety I saw paralysing a lot of my friends.
More a heavy sadness, like the waves of grief. We’ve had to isolate from my daughter’s father; we don’t know when he’ll next see her.
The sight of her one night putting her little arms around the phone during their video call and saying “cuddle?” nearly broke me.
Like lots of us, she’s having vivid dreams each night, which she recounts to me every morning. “I dreamt granddad collected me for school,” she says, and I have to hide my face in the press, pretending to be looking for something so she won’t see the tears in my eyes.
“I miss granddad,” she says a few days in and gets upset. As kids do, five minutes later she appears to have moved on entirely. But I begin to notice an increase in mentions of physical complaints, a regular sore tummy.
I find that the time I’m most bothered by the social isolation is when I least want to talk to other people.
Friends call and I ignore them, or text saying “bad day, won’t risk crying in front of her, speak tomorrow”. We video-call my parents and I stay just out of sight of the camera so they can’t see me welling up.
When my daughter sees my father she howls “grrrraandaaaaad”, and I can barely hold it together. The panic comes in waves: when my mother texts late at night to check in; when my daughter goes silent and stares into the middle distance. “Alright Beanie?” I ask her. “I miss Daddy, and everyone,” she replies.
I tell myself, you know how to do this — you’ve been through this before. When your marriage ends, all sense of the future you had imagined disappears and for a time instead the future becomes a scary place. Who knows what it will bring?
But I know what that is. Future thinking. Worrying about things yet to come, which may never happen, things you cannot control.
By worrying about the future, you risk overwhelming yourself in the present.
Stay right here in this moment, I tell myself strictly. Tidy a room. Paint with your daughter. Give her a bath.
It’s not all bad, though. As with everything, there is a flipside. Obviously, adult conversation would be good.
But there is something to be said for the company of a joyful five-year-old who isn’t consumed with anxiety. It can be helpful that the face you spend all day looking at isn’t tinged with panic.
But then when you get consumed by fear, for her, for yourself, for your family, your work, there’s no one to bounce it off.
“Not having someone to carry the fear I have and being the only one to carry it for my son…” another single mother confides. “The nights are the worst.”
Throughout this first week, I’ve been making regular trips to the kitchen to cry, before heading back in to pretend all is fine.
People are lovely. We have a Whatsapp dinner party with my best friend and her family, where the children eat pasta and shout at each other.
My cousin and my aunt drop off book parcels for my daughter. I contact the Department of Health to enquire as to the safety of two single parents joining forces.
“It’s really a case of individuals now weighing up all the pros and cons of doing something like this against the public health advice of good hand hygiene, respiratory etiquette, social distancing, keeping surfaces clean etc.
“Is everyone currently well? Does anybody have underlying conditions? Has anyone been in contact with a suspected or confirmed case? Is there sufficient space in the house? Answers to these types of questions will help people judge whether the advantages outweigh the risk.”
It sounds like a yes. Frolo, the networking app for single parents, is facilitating virtual meetups, group messaging for members, and providing advice.
The Whatsapping calms down, but I find I need to still be careful. All that posting of routines online. It’s helpful, I suppose, but difficult if your reality is trying to maintain a full-time career, with no one to take the parenting shift while you work.
financial
“Do they think all mothers are at home, not working through this?” asks one single mother with three children who have been sent home with huge amounts of school work.
Mine is five, and I have made an executive decision that she will be fine, whatever amount we do or do not get done. But it’s
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