People who need people are the luckiest people in the world

People are all around. Their worlds and their lives running at different speeds and often in different directions. That master of the character description, Charles Dickens penned portraits which live in our minds to this day. His art lay in making those characters seem alive and believable, they exhibited in an old fashioned way many of the human traits that we recognise in ourselves and others. The rich pickings from his observations produced the human pathos which became a political commentary of the life of that time and the capture of the complex interplay between people is what makes his writing the genius it is.
Looking around both left and right I have an abundance of material in the road in which I live and of course I mustn't forget my own life's parody which is full of trips and turns.
Next door to my right lives an old couple, I can use the term old because he is over 80. Having lived a full life which included a stint in the army overseas. He often tries to beguile me with stories of the lands he travelled on the Queens shilling, lands and people who were totally foreign to his life in the hamlet of Bishops Stortford but who made a lasting impression on his young soldiers mind. He was of course insulated by his uniform from the "native people" as well as insulated by the conformity of an upbringing who saw Johnny Foreigner as inferior. 
His wife a terrier of a different cloth who given a better chance in life would have made something of herself but has grown to know her place. She is in awe of certain things and finds great pleasure in visiting the large estates and stately houses to gawk at the better half. But beneath her longing recognition for the material display these these beautiful estates exude, is a fiery determination to be heard and understood in her own right. Her political views are mature.  She prides herself on being a thrifty and is typical of a house proud citizen who's only outward concession is to grow loverly, well ordered flower beds for the passerby to see and admire. 
In the bleak terraced house streets of the northern towns with no gardens, this flourish of human speciality was reflected in the time a women spent burnishing the front step to her house. 
The street is beginning to reflect the times we are living in. Not withstanding my own situation, the young lady next door has under her care two young kids from a failed marriage. The Nepalese woman directly across from me also has two young children but sadly her husband departed the family home, and next to her another young women has been left with three children to bring up. I think in her case although we deduced that her policeman husband was to blame she seems to have made a remarkable quick turnaround and now has a strapping young fella to carry her cases.
The lady next door is Dutch and she so resembles the stoic race of her youth. Attractive but always deep in thought her car pulls in and the disciplined routine of her circuiting the car to open the back doors to let the kids out is routine. There is little laughter only the performance of responsibility which is the lot of some one dumped with the kids. I know that there are many husbands who would give their eyes teeth to have the children and one of the disgraces of modern society is the withdrawal rights a woman has in allowing access of her ex to see the children. That said the pressure on a man or women to bring up children is enormous and never ending. Well,  never ending until "they" feel secure enough to announce they don't need your help any more and depart leaving you where you perhaps wished you were 20 years previously ! The life of an occupational mother or a father today is one of being a taxi, a restaurant, a laundry and a bank with little time for yourself. 
When there are two of you the load can be shared, not always 50,50 but shared in many ways. The biggest and most important thing is that you continue to run your adult lives in parallel to the needs of the children and don't subvert yourself,  as is the danger when you are on your own.