The single Mom

I'm not a curtain twitchier but sitting in my chair, which is close to the window I see some of the comings and goings out in the street. Usually my attention is fully drawn to my iPad as I write a blog or read a ebook but sometimes my eye is caught by the movement of my neighbours car as she arrives home.

The routine is clockwork. The car comes to a halt in the drive there's a pause as she opens the drivers door and walks around the back of the car to open slightly the rear door. She then opens the front door to the house and goes in. There is another pause and then like a Chrysalis opening its wings there is movement and out tumble, first the little boy and then his sister. It's a sequence that never changes. 




Once the kids are in the house she re-emerges to fish out the bags and paraphernalia that the kids need at school and any shopping she may have done. She does it without any show of emotion not even a word, efficiently discharging her responsibilities.

I wonder what goes through her mind. This is not the life she had planned, she is still young, in her early thirties, Dutch extract, friendly in a continental way but largely keeping herself to herself.
Married young she had a life joined to another, a man of her age, convention had it to start a family but a family as an adjunct to her life with him. The source of her natural intellectual replenishment   would be the conversation as she prepared dinner, he playing with the kids asking them what they had done at school, maybe settled them into homework, possibly running the bath water for them so they could be ready for bed after the evening meal when he and she could at last relax.
This cosy family scene was blown apart by divorce and now her lot in life is to carry the burden alone. Raising kids is a burden, its a non stop, all action commitment which is more than challenging when you have to do everything on your own. The love for your children is not diminished but you must yearn for adult contact, a prop to discuss the vagaries, someone to share your guilt that you are not doing enough, somebody to allay your fears when one or other of the children are sick.
The kids tumble into home oblivious of her feelings only of their own. A slight at school, blown up into world war two, or the ongoing niggle between brother and sister a nip here and a hair pulling there and the whole world explodes with rage and self pity.
At last they are in bed. The little boy has a nasty cough but is drifting off to sleep as she returns down stairs to an empty lounge and ruminate on the day knowing that tomorrow will be much the same and so on through the best years of her life. On a treadmill only partly of her own making which will end when the children fly the nest completely and make the chore of being a single Mom even more singular, even more challenging as age takes its toll !!