The Challenge of Being a Marathon-Running Single Parent

I told myself I’d try to write a little each day – whether that be on the blog or part of my book-writing resolution.  Things were going pretty well – my daughter was in Disney with her uncle for a week and I was able to get some things in order and make plans based on what I thought I’d be able to accomplish over the next year.

Then she came home.

Samantha is such a wonderful 6-year old.  She is smart, social, well-behaved and really doesn’t ask for much – just a little of daddy’s attention from time to time.  I'm really lucky on that front.

When we got home from work/school, I started cooking dinner and she played with her Christmas toys.  But the brussel sprouts are barely in the pan and I am still slicing chicken and cucumbers (no, not with the same knife – I am typically a fairly competent cook) when she starts asking for me to play with her.  So, I do.  And I burn the sprouts just enough that she doesn’t want them, and the very tiniest bit of black pepper on the chicken somehow makes it “too spicy.”  Maybe I'm not as competent of a cook as I think I am. I wind up making her something else, because I can’t let the girl go to bed with a dinner of only cucumbers.

We finish dinner and then go through her homework, which isn’t much.  Then we color and listen to music and dance and before I know it, it’s time for bed.

I get up really early for work and because of that, it’s usually an early bedtime for Sam – the more sleep she gets, the less grumpy she is in the morning.  We brush teeth, read a book, and then lights out.  Then I do the dishes from dinner and get ready for tomorrow – which now means I make lunch for myself and get my gym bag ready for tomorrow’s lunchtime workout.

Then I look down… it’s 9pm.  Really.  Where did the day go?  I literally haven’t stopped since I woke up this morning, and now I’m exhausted.  I wanted to do just a short workout – a 25-minute hill program on the elliptical.  The exhaustion is compounded by a sense of guilt now, too, because my gym is in the basement and my daughter’s room is on the second floor.  What if she needs me?  I can’t hear her from the basement.  This goes beyond the simple, "Daddy I want a drink of water."  She has had night-terrors in the past, and though she has largely outgrown them, the thought of her going through that alone because I'm jogging away is very unsettling.

Are there solutions?  Maybe.  Maybe I should get a baby monitor and put it in her room.  Maybe I should move the elliptical up to my bedroom until I feel more comfortable.

But none of these could happen tonight, so I just wound up heading to bed at about 9:30 or so, figuring I’d wake up early and get the workout in then.

But at 3:30, Samantha woke up and came into my room.  I’m not too shocked – she is getting back to her routine after a week in Disney.  So I got her back into bed, and then realized that my alarm was going to ring in another 75 minutes, and that even in the morning I’m going to be nervous about being in the basement working out while she’s upstairs asleep.

There’s nothing like setting up a plan, and then watching it go to hell on day one.  It was an ineffective plan to begin with, and I can see how it would be easy to just ditch the whole thing and tear into a bottle of wine every night once Samantha gets to bed.  For that, I’m lucky that I’m still in my gung-ho, goal-crushing, New Year’s Resolution mode.  So, I hired a sitter to watch Sam tonight for an hour while I ran.  I realize that she doesn’t really need a sitter while I’m in the house, but I need her to have a sitter or else I won’t ever run.  I can swing this once a week – it’s really my only choice until she’s old enough for me to feel comfortable, which probably won’t be until she’s 30, but hey… that’s fatherhood.

Being a single parent has to be treated as a fluid situation, balancing the time needed to be an attentive and effective father with what I need to do to accomplish my own goals.  I’m still learning… I think I’ll always be learning.