It can be hard enough trying to juggle the work/life balance, requiring the special skills only a professional chainsaw juggler can master.
Doing it as a single-married parent (SMP) can be even harder. For the parent picking up the slack at home while their partner is away or working shifts, it can be very stressful.
You have to do it all, like any single parent. Getting the kids up and out the door, the mad rush in the morning to get everyone ready, lunches made, and kids’ backpacks packed that they were supposed to do the night before. Spending the hours at work only to rush back to pick up the kids or get home to your latchkey kids. You’re juggling making supper, cleaning, getting kids to turn that T.V. off and do their homework, and probably cleaning up something the cat or dog puked on the carpet.
You sit through dinner, wanting to rush, wanting to rush those slow eating kids, while hearing all the dramas of life in grade school and trying to help them resolve their problems (or if you have teenagers, watching them sit moodily at the table and getting the occasional grunt accompanied by a should shrug in response to your questions about how their day went).
Then you spend the rest of the evening cleaning, doing laundry, cleaning, dealing with the dramas and fights between the kids, and trying to get your kids bathed and into bed; if you aren’t out running around all evening taking them to sports and other activities.
So what makes it more challenging than just being a single parent? You are not just balancing your life/work worlds; you are balancing those in one hand while juggling them with your partner’s shifting availability.
Without having the little pleasures in life you will go mad. You know what I mean, watching your favorite show, schmoozing on Facebook or playing their mindless games, and whatever other activities give you that momentary feeling of escaping the rush and grind of life even though the growing mound of laundry is threatening to swallow you all, the dust critters under the couch probably got eaten by larger dust critters, and you can hear the constant clamour in the back of your mind from all the things you should be doing.
Sometimes you even have certain things you like to do on certain days. For me it used to be popcorn, wine, and watching the new episode of Lost on T.V. each week.
But what happens when your schedule/needs and your partner’s just don’t mesh? This has become our way of life with my partner on rotating shifts of days/evenings/nights.
We’re still working on figuring it out, how best to make it work, and trying out new solutions to the problems. Of course, everyone’s situation is unique so what works for one may not work for another.
And if money is tight like it is for us, your options are limited even further. You may not have those scheduled activities that give your life a more stable feeling. You could be like us and find your and your kids lives outside of work/school revolving around your partner’s ever changing hours and availability just because that’s the only noticeable influence you have in your lives outside of school/work.
That can leave everyone feeling less in control, like their lives are as much a confused jumbled mess as a thirteen year old’s bedroom.
Sometimes it’s in the little pleasures that it hits you. For us, our weekends mostly don’t mesh. I work regular hours, days, Monday to Friday. The kids and my weekends are like most others, Saturday and Sunday. My partner’s ‘weekend’ usually happens during the week and in exchange for long shift hours and constantly rotating hours he has longer ‘weekends’. Pretty much it’s always someone’s weekend, except the odd day out, but they seldom coincide.
For the kids this means I often have to say ‘no’ to having friends over on the weekend because my partner has to sleep all day to go to work. Unfortunately I also don’t have the money to take them out to get them out of the house.
For me it seems more like my weekend is relegated to those too short few weekday evening hours on the days my partner has a ‘weekend’.
It’s his weekend, he wants to relax, watch a movie, snack, and have a few drinks. But, he doesn’t want to do it alone. Hell, who does when you have someone right there to do it with?
I would prefer to take that time to sit back, relax, watch a movie, have a glass of wine - on MY weekend; not when I’m frazzled, beat, and have to get up at 5:30 in the morning. It’s just not the same when you take away that ‘it’s the weekend’ feeling out of your weekend pleasures. It’s still just a regular work night.
The problem? Well, it can’t always be the weekend, obviously. I don’t particularly want to spend every night wallowing in front of the television having drinks while my partner keeps trying to get me to snack out with him on snacks I don’t really want. I don’t have the time either.
When you take a pleasure and turn it into a daily obligation it’s only a matter of time before it stops being a pleasure; that weekend movie and wine becomes a slump instead of a relaxing pleasure. It’s like finding something you really like and then eating it for supper every single night until you get so sick of it that you dread supper coming and having to eat it again.
And when you find yourself scheduling your ‘weekend’ on a workday and making the weekend a non-stop 2-day cleaning binge to play catch-up on the chores you didn’t do the rest of the week, well it just isn’t a weekend. You can’t force the workdays to have that ‘it’s the weekend’ feeling of freedom knowing you don’t have to go to work tomorrow. And you don’t get a weekend on your weekend because you’re working your keester off getting a week’s work of chores done in two days. You don’t have time to sit back and relax for an hour or two.
It’s not about who is right. Really, no matter which partner schedules their ‘weekend’ on a workday evening it means someone gives up their weekend. Or if you share both weekends you have that slump of doing it every day that sucks the specialness out of the weekend pleasures and the household chores are abandoned until they revolt. While some people have no problem with that, others (like me) just find sitting in front of the boob tube every night depressing. After a week of that I feel like a mindless gelatinous lump.
The trick perhaps is in finding the fine balance of making two separate lives mesh in one household. There is no way around it. The Monday to Friday 9-5ers are living one life while the person working shifts or travelling is living another separate life, in one house.
With the rest of the household living the 9-5, Monday to Friday life, and the kids needing that feeling of consistency, that reliability and dependability and stability of regular schedules, the other parent can end up being the odd person out. Meanwhile everyone else’s lives are in constant disorder, trying to revolve it around the one person out.
You need to figure out how to keep the stable and scheduled life environment for the household while also being flexible enough that no one is pushed to the edges of the family and are left looking in as an outsider.
If we figure out what works for us I’ll let you know.
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