Different

"I feel bad saying I'm tired, I can't believe I'm complaining to you."

"I shouldn't say anything, I know I'm lucky to have her Dad with me."

"Do you ever sleep? Seriously, when do you sleep? When do you have time?"

Yep. I'm busy. I work full-time. I write part-time. I have a preschooler, who I raise alone. I volunteer. I'm on an advisory council. I might be picking up another part-time job. It's called life and while it might not look just like yours, I'm not comparing because it's really apples to oranges, isn't it? Let's just stop comparing.

When Mr Hockey Coach exclaims that he's tired and I nod empathetically, he immediately retracts his statement because he "can't be tired" because he's not me, he's not raising a kid. Wait, what? No, honey, you can be tired.

When my girlfriend vents about how hard it is to be a working parent, she suddenly bites her tongue and says how lucky she is to have her partner with her - someone to share the load. But it's still hard. Parenting is hard. Juggling your workload is hard. Maintaining a social life is hard. It's all hard.

I'm one "try being a single parent" meme away from my head exploding because we're all comparing apples to pineapples and watermelon to walnuts and it's gotta stop. It's useless. It's tiresome. It's time consuming. And we single parents aren't superior to the stay-at-home moms or the work-at-home moms or the parents who have a partner to help raise the kids. (Sorry, single parents. Our shit stinks, too.)

I have friends who are stay-at-home moms, and their lives are busy and rewarding and they are no easier and no harder than mine. They're different. Same goes for my work-at-home mom friends. Shit, I've got friends who don't have kids whose lives are as busy and hectic and stressful and awesome as mine. 

We all have routines and when they are interrupted, it throws us off. 

We all have challenges. We all have needs. We all have ups and downs.

I'm not invincible. I just have different priorities. Not bad. Not better.

 Just different.

Unbroken Family

Last week, someone "kindly" forwarded a link to my email.
(catch that? it's called sarcasm and i am dripping with it today)

The name of the article that the link was for was "How to Survive the Holidays as a Broken Family". I have an issue with the term "broken family" - though, admittedly, not nearly as big an issue as I have with the fact that someone felt it was necessary to send me that bullshit link. In case you're wondering, a "broken family" is defined as a family where parents are separated or divorced, but I'm still not really feelin' it. A "broken home" essentially mirrors that statement, except it's a house with a broken family living inside of it.

My family is not broken. It is not defective. It might not look like yours, but it's made of the exact. same. stuff. 

I had a broken family when I had a husband who didn't help me raise our child. I had a broken home when a truck meant more than a marriage, and when fun with friends was more important than family. I had a broken life when my heart ached because my relationship was empty and my dreams were in the dark. I don't have those things any more, and my son does not come from a "broken home". He comes from a home that's filled with love and support and he has a family that loves and cares about him more than anything else in the world. He might not have someone in the house who he calls "Dad", but he's got a group of great men to look up to, each of whom is more than willing to lend a hand along the way.

Terms like "broken" serves only to tell our kids that there's something wrong with their home. Their family is "bad", it's not right. It's broken, like a toy that needs to be thrown away. Isn't being a kid in a situation with only one parent hard enough, without society telling him or her that their family is wrong? Isn't being a kid in the society we're in hard enough? I know as an adult that hearing terms like "broken family" or "broken home" make me feel badly about my life, and it's bullshit because my life is pretty awesome, and perfectly imperfect in its one-piecedness.

Does it suck that my family falls into the category of "broken"? No. Sure, I didn't plan on being a single parent but I'd way rather raise F alone than be miserable in a relationship where I felt just that - alone. My kid is a Hell of a lot better off having a parent who is genuinely happy than he would have been with two parents who weren't.

Families, like the people they are made up of, are unique. I explain this to F all the time. Some families have brothers or sisters, some have brothers and sisters. Some have no children, some have one child and others have all kinds of children. Sometimes they're different colours. Some families have one mom or two moms, two dads, one dad or a mom and a dad. But for all the differences, families are the exact same because they're made of love, whether they are nuclear, blended, upside down, purple, green, single-parented and triple-childed. 

And every family has hiccups and crazy Holiday stuff to deal with.

THE END.