Why Can't I Get Solo Parenting Right?

And the many tactics I'm trying to put into action to get better at managing mentally

Over the past month, the yin and yang of my personal juggle has been completely out of balance. Out of fricking whack. School strikes, two birthdays and kid’s parties, world book day, our beloved childminder moving on, the littlest teething, both projectile puking with a stomach bug (including today’s full frontal vomit to the chest at lunch, which led to me walking through the Soho House in my bra)… Parents reading will have all been there, but the constellation of crazy on the back of 8 days of solo parenting has taken its toll and left me with a jaggedy mental health hangover.

Trying to unpick why I have become so strung out, I’ve realised that in the past, my reflections on the solo struggle might have been focused in the wrong areas. Yes, looking after the kids can be boring, laborious and I’m not the most naturally playful person. But that’s not why I have problems coping. I’m not work-shy and even though looking after the kids on my own is excessively physical because of our childcare set up, usually I get off on that kind of thing. I’m patient (wallpaper hanging, chain necklace untangling, give me a time-consuming drag and I will find a sense of accomplishment) and generally nails about H A R D T H I N G S. The real problem, I’ve finally clocked, is that looking after my children on my own for any longer than three or four days reveals the full extent of my anxieties. I become so high on adrenaline, pumped to the eyeballs on cortisol, that I go into the parental pressure dome and I find it very hard to find my way back, even when life goes back to ‘normal’.

I’ll paint the picture. 

Four thirty rolls around and I’m scrabbling to send an email to a client, so I don’t have time to pre-prepare the kids’ food before sprinting to the tube. I get to nursery, but unfortunately 72 other parents arrive just ahead, so it takes 20 minutes to extract youngest. He’s bawling, so I give him half an oat bar to calm him down. I carry him up to the platform, jump on the tube, carry him down the other side, run with the buggy at speed to the train line bridge (another up and down). Get to eldest, he doesn’t have his helmet and has apparently lost another school sweater. We enter first stage meltdown bc of the healthy snack I give him. He gets half an oat bar. I then say he can’t use his scooter bc there’s no helmet (if you’d seen him on a scooter, you’d understand). Enter stage two meltdown. Another train bridge (up and down, now with defunct scooter on shoulder). Back home, I make pasta pesto, with crudités. I sit holding Ripley’s bowl bc he’s going through an aggressive throwing phase. The doorbell goes; Haden has purchased an Amazon parcel from NYC. Ideal. Get back to table, pasta pesto is half up wall. Ripley has swallowed precisely nothing and now wailing to get down. Grey is asking for more food; I encourage him to eat his crudités. Take Rips to bath, screams head off, his eczema looks bad - we’re trying to reintroduce dairy as his teeth haven’t come through, but that’s brought his skin issues roaring back. I turn to get a toothbrush and somehow, in a millisecond, he slips. Heart stops, my lungs constrict in reflex. Piercing scream, I scoop him up, both of us now dripping, drenched wet. He’s ok, but now crying for a bottle. I’ve read in the books he should not be having one at this age, so I compromise with a beaker which I don’t tighten enough. Oat milk all over cot. Change bedding. Eldest has now been shouting ‘what happened to Ripley’ in a loop for at least nine minutes. Deep breath. Head to fridge only to find him crying that I never listen to him. Takes another half an hour to get him to bed during which he asks me about death and says he misses his dad. Actually he wishes that I would die and come back as a different (better) mum. It’s 8pm. I’ve got two hours of editing to do and the dome has closed in. *Pours glass of Merlot*

I understand the above is parents to greater or lesser degrees. All the time. Honestly, I can normally manage it alright. I generally have what I’ve learnt is a large ‘window of tolerance’. But when I’m on my own, the panes of that window smash into sharp splints, each and every one piercing my composure to smithereens.

We all have worries. This is not news. But what we don’t talk enough about are the specific worries that we have when it comes to parental responsibility. Mine are: lateness anxiety, worries about my children’s poor nutrition, the chance they will die in my care from an accident, the chance I will say something which ruins their future mental health, the chance they won’t - in the end - love me, an anxiety around untidiness, the chance that Ripley has a genetic condition, the chance that Grey has a behavioural condition. The likelihood that I’m modelling anxiety for my kids; that they will end up on tranquillisers because of me. That covers the top 10. Day to day, I have a neat scaffold of coping mechanisms which web together to stop me falling into any kind of dome. Exercise, space to walk. Eating well, adult conversation. The problem is the whole fricking thing goes to shit when I’m on my own. It’s not the solo parenting that’s the problem, it’s the lack of time and space to apply the sticking plasters for my anxieties that’s the issue. 

I absolutely know I’m not the only parent who feels like this. I speak with other mums who tell me they keep their kids in bed with them at night when they’re alone in case there’s a fire. Or barricade the front door with furniture in case of a break-in. One friend tells me she only does a wet wipe wash all week when her partner is away because she can’t face the stress of bath-time with two. I also know several mums who flat out refuse to do it for more than a night or two because they feel the anxiety would be too overwhelming. I don’t worry about fire or burglars. Well at least I didn’t. I’m sure others don’t care as much about Weetabix encrusted jute. How anxieties play out are so dependent on our personal lens, so it wont be exactly the same for any of us. But for many of you, I know the panic will be familiar.

Growing up, I always believed that I could be a single parent. As I was raised by one, I believed I had it in me. When my ex-husband left, I started looking into sperm donation (at 30 perhaps slightly jumping the mark) because I felt secure I had what it took to be a mum and a dad to a child.

Sadly, my experience suggests I am not up to it. Which is now an additional concern, lest for whatever reason I end up in that boat.

Speaking to my own single mum this week, her take is that I don’t flex my lifestyle enough when I’m home alone. She says that as a single mother, unless there was literally no other option, I wouldn’t be getting a tube to any nursery. I would have had to find a more convenient childcare option. I wouldn’t be working on three books at once and would have paced my professional life differently. I wouldn’t be stitching cushions til midnight, I’d be KO’d by 9pm. I would be drinking tea and not the kind from Long Island. She suggests I change my whole set up during solo weeks and try and take part time leave. She sees the attempt to try and carry on my double parent lifestyle with just me available for care as setting myself up for failure.

She also suggests we try to implement boundaries and planning around my partner’s trips instead of them cropping up a fortnight before. This advice is all very good theoretically and I’ve taken it on board. The problem is that freelance life isn’t quite like that. I can’t always take leave (from myself), Hade can’t always push back on a trip. 

So, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks exploring a range of things to help support me when I don’t have access to any of my usual mental health crutches, when things just are what they are and I’m sharing them for anyone who might need it for the weeks of strikes, sick bugs and solo parental responsibility ahead.

1. Remind Yourself You Are Part of an Army

At 5pm, in homes up and down the country there is a legion of (mostly) women in your shoes. You are not abnormal, or a terrible parent or faulty if your head almost explodes from time to time. In fact, it is almost embarrassingly normative to be experiencing at least some of these concerns, whether you work or not. We are in the trenches; this is what it is like for nearly everyone patching it together. We all want to scream fuck, fuck, fuck, bollocks, bugger into a pillow. Mother bloody Teresa would be tested by these circumstances. Anyone would. After 1500+ bedtimes, I like to think I’m a bedtime expert. Yet sometimes it all goes to shit. End of story.

2.      Somatic Techniques

I’ve long been into the somatic (meaning body-based) solutions to issues of the mind. My personal favourite emotional releases are hip opening exercises and back bends; I’m often emotional in yoga as the tension leaves my joints. Several of my followers directed me to somatic techniques for calming the mind, my favourite of which is placing the base of each palm in the eye socket and pushing firmly. Your objective is to ground yourself back physically in the moment, so some practitioners suggest running your hands under cold water and using your senses to observe what you can see, touch, smell, hear and taste in your environment. It’s very annoying to be told to remember to breathe. Also remember to breathe.

3.      Don’t Stop the Joy

During evenings home alone, what I look forward to is doing my hobby, which happens to be DIY. So many people have messaged me to tell me to stop stitching or papering or painting in the evenings if I’m struggling, but I believe this advice is misplaced. I find these tasks meditative and they get me off my phone. Don’t get me wrong, I do need to get better at knowing when to stop, but we all relax in different ways. I often find watching tv boring and depressing, and I scroll the whole time, double screening my brain into a fritz. I’m not great at guided meditation either. But listening to classic FM, slowly and methodically moving my hands in a creative rhythm helps me unwind. It’s finding your own meditation mode which is key.

4.      Community Building

Asking for help has never been my forte, and there is something in the mothering culture of this land (at least its cities) which suggests that asking for any kind of assistance is presumptive and shows you’re not up to the task. Additionally, as someone who only recently found her village, I can say it’s all very well saying ask for help, but what if you don’t have anyone to ask? This is something that is a much longer term project—finding your kind souls. Try school and nursery clubs and the PTA, reach out to other parents in your class Whatsapp group to ask if anyone lives on your school route and would like to share a run or two. One of the mums in Grey’s class took him in for three mornings and it was such an incredible help.

On my trickiest days, I took out my phone to send messages of love and support to the people that I care about, investing both in my community and shifting my mentality from panic to gratitude. Whenever I start thinking too much about myself, it is one of my in-the-minute tactics which always seems to help.

5.      Frozen Home Cooked Meals

Nutrition-wise, going forward I’m going to treat myself like a patient when I go through the mental wringer.  By pre-preparing my dinners and freezing or ordering a bundle of meals like the ones we gift to new parents, I will avoid eating frozen pizzas 9 nights in a row. I am great at feeding others, have always been terrible at feeding myself. Work in progress.

6.      Everyday Kindness to Yourself

I have learnt so much about self-love from one of my favourite Instagram accounts, a body neutral movement programme, set up by activist Bethany Meyers @thebecomeproject. They tell you at the end of every routine to give yourself a kiss on each shoulder, which I now do religiously at the end of my exercise classes (not getting less strange over here) and I’ve started to do it (ahem, privately) at home. My self-talk mantras focus on how well I’m doing, how it is hard, but that I am up to it. I remind myself I can breathe fire. Also, that it is ok to struggle. No-one is bulletproof. I need to stop saying that I’m crumbling, that I’m doing poorly or am terrible at things. Far better to frame it as challenging circumstances which I’m working on gaining skills to navigate.

7.      Finding the Way Back

When my partner got home, I found myself still jittery and far less able to cope with the hiccups of life with mini people. I hadn’t been able to get out of the pressure dome. I couldn’t work, my thoughts lacked clarity, then I ended up getting blotto at my neighbour’s house at the most inopportune time possible. This is not the route to equilibrium; it only prolonged my state of frazzlement. It might happen to you too though, so try not to judge yourself too harshly. I’m finally back on solid ground and my mind feels back in order, but it’s taken over two weeks. You can’t expect an overburdened mind to switch back to its calm state overnight, you have to work your way back.

In conclusion, the mind and its tolerance for the weight of parental responsibility is not an infinite resource. We all tip the scales from time to time, but knowing what’s going down, having some kind of self-awareness and understanding that we are not the only ones who have taken an extended trip into the pressure dome really does help support you. You’re not an unfit parent because you find looking after your kids stressful. I’m hoping to the gods that next time will be easier - practice has got to make it better even if perfect remains elusive.

*An advice session was held at our school by talkingwithirene.co.uk on the window of tolerance. Sadly I couldn’t make it, but I read through all the supporting documents and it really helped me. Do check Irene’s work out if you are struggling.

**I don’t know if there is a non condescending way to say this, but anyone parenting alone, you are our true heroes.