Living with a Single Parent

My father was a nice, docile man when sober, but transformed to a loud, quarrelsome stranger when drunk. And he drank everyday!

Finally, mom gave up and decided to divorce him and file for our custody. He had given her enough reasons to stick her neck out and fight for a family that he never allowed to “BE”. I had always prayed to God for a ‘normal’ family and finally he was answering our prayers. But normal is exactly what it would never be is what I went on to discover.

I was happy that my parents split up. There was no more fighting and no more dreading the evenings. But living with one parent instead of two can bring out a lot of emotions. These feelings can be pretty strong and also confusing. Being divorced made mom quit her job as a night telephone operator. She could not leave her two little girls alone every night. She had to look for a daytime job. She found one as a cash attendant in a grocery store. Now there was no father and no mother throughout the day. It made me terribly sad and angry. At times I thought the earlier days were better!

We also had to move closer to my grand parents’ home so they could pitch in to help mom. This meant changing our school and leaving our friends behind. How many people were we supposed to leave to get away from our father? It was nice to be with our grandparents but the bargain did not seem fair. They loved us but I could not help but yearn for our home, friends and school. Everything familiar was being taken away from us. With all the feeling of loss and stress to our young minds, we started blaming mom for all our problems.

There were financial difficulties also. Mom’s new job paid her lesser besides the fact that she had to run the whole house singlehandedly.There was the deposit and the rent of the house too.We had changed our school in the middle of the session too, so no refund of the fees from earlier school. And then there was the lawyer’s fee. My father was contesting the divorce, trying to salvage a non-existent marriage or to exact punishment on my poor mother for trying to escape from it. It never struck him that he was adding to the woes of his children too.

That was a tough time. Mom was busy, short-tempered, stressed-out and had no time for us. The school was new and there were no friends to confide in. In fact, we did not try to make friends lest anyone got to know that we come from a ‘broken home’. Money was in short supply and so was our love and patience for each other. With our almost regular fights and tantrums we could easily have given dad a run for our money. And we blamed mom for all our troubles.

Things took a turn for the better when one of mother’s coworkers asked her to go and see a counsellor with us. He would help us through this phase. He validated all our fears and concerns as something typical of people in our situations. It relieved us from the fear that we were all going mad and that there was no solution to our problems. Living with a single parent can be very stressful and finally to be able to tell someone helped a lot.

He advised us to join a group of single parent families. Interacting with people in a similar situation helped and they became our permanent support system. That there were so many like us helped negate our feelings of shame for our situation. We finally made some new friends there. We even kept post-dinnertime as our family talk-time to go over our day and share our feelings. Things began to relax. We started helping mom with her daily chores. We kept Sunday as our family day out. Mom also enrolled us in some after-school programme that kept us busy till she came back from work. Financial situation also improved with the divorce and child support being finalized.

In the end I would say it is an experience I would not like to repeat or recommend but now that it’s happened I would say, “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired and success achieved.”

Article Source: http://www.myaddirectory.com

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you would like more information on how to get a quickie Divorce see www.quickie-divorce.com

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