Single Parenthood & I: The Looks You Get

The looks you get change as you get older, and the key is to continue to not care.

To a point, it’s like being a frog in boiling water. Single parenthood wasn’t suddenly thrust upon me. It creeped up on me from behind, a growing feeling that this was how things were going to be, and that I should start getting used to it and prepared for it, because it would be for the best for everybody for it to turn out this way. I was never left, as it were, ‘holding the baby’.

There was a time when we had to live together, but she finally went, in September 2022, it was at the start of a school year. The worst of the pandemic seemed to have passed, and my biggest single concern was what the kids had missed out upon during those months when we were confined to our homes and a very limited number of people indeed. I’d spent the previous few months cleaning and decluttering the house, getting ready for when that particular push came to shove. That it should come at the start of a school year felt like a moment of renewal for all of us.

She moved to a small flat on the other side of town, and it was agreed that I would have them Monday to Fridays and that she would have them at weekends. It’s an agreement that has now held for more than two years, and it has become a rhythm into which we’ve all become settled. The kids are used to it. It’s just the way their lives are.

There are times when I’ve recognised the longing in their hearts for a ‘normal’ family, their occasional failure to understand that mummy and daddy loving each other as much as they love their kids is completely normal. This is still often manifested through pictures of the four of us together, the one thing that, the benefit of hindsight has come to teach me, was never, ever, ever going to happen.

People tend to look at things they find unusual. That’s just human nature. In honesty, I get fewer looks with them now than I did when they were little. The very idea that I might know how to change a nappy, or might have a bag full of everything I needed to look after them, and that I could do it on my own seemed alien to some. There were times, when walking the street with one in a pushchair and the other at my side, that we’d be looked at as though a different species. It was subtle, but it was real.

That doesn’t tend to happen so much these days; or if it does, it’s a different look. I pick the kids up from their mother on Sunday afternoons and we wander home at our own pace. There are dads with their kids all over the place. Big divorced dad energy all over the place. But there’s one key difference between the rest of them and I; the others are mostly taking their kids somewhere. I’m taking them home from somewhere. I’m still getting looks. It’s just that they’re different to what they used to be.

The numbers back that feeling of minority up, as everybody knows. 16% of families are lone-parent families, and the proportion of single parents who are fathers is around 10%. In other words, single dads as the primary carer make up 1.6% of all family arrangements. I mean, I know this as a fact. There are plenty of other dads and grandads dropping their kids off at school and picking them up, but after three years I’m unaware that any of the rest of them are in the same boat as me. None of the teachers or assistants have ever pointed any out to me, not that I’ve ever asked.

Sometimes, I look around that playground on a weekday morning and I’m insanely jealous of the others. I know fully well that these people are mostly part of fully functioning family units. I’m not just jealous on behalf of myself. I’m jealous on behalf of the children. There are moments at which the fullness of what they’ve not felt throughout their lives hits me so hard that it could knock me down. But it hasn’t, because you have to keep going.

It has been put to me before that this lifestyle is exceptional, and it’s certainly true to say that we are the exception. I write freelance for a living—I was made redundant eight months into single parenthood and essentially left with little choice; there is no fear quite like the fear that not only could you be struggling to survive, but that two children who have done nothing whatsoever wrong could be doing so as well. It’s almost paralysing.

We got through that because we had to. It has occasionally been expressed to me before that what we do is somehow incredible, to which my immediate answer in the past has been, “You wouldn’t be saying this were I a woman”, because that’s just the truth. There is literally nothing that a woman can do in terms of raising my children that I cannot do. The reason why I’m in such a tiny minority as a single dad is the result of hundreds of years of societal conditioning, rather than any form of biological imperative.

So I talk very consciously of parenthood rather than fatherhood. In most respects, I am a parent first. And I know I’m one of the luckier ones. I get those two days off a week. I get a break. There are many, many who just have this state of affairs, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And knowing how I feel when I have a couple of weeks solid with them—although I am prepared to also admit that my advancing years may have some influence upon my tiredness—I can only have enormous empathy with those people for whom there is no ‘time off’.

I can assure you that I don’t believe myself to be amazing in terms of anything I do, and more certainly than anything else not account of my gender. It’s unusual, yes. But ‘amazing’? Well, if I’m amazing, then so are all the single mums out there doing exactly as me, and often without even the ability to even take those little breaks which keep me on the level.

And if you want to look at how amazing society thinks we are collectively, all you have to do is consider the extent to which they’ve been considered a ‘problem’ or a ‘burden’ by a society that has routinely demonised them for centuries. The looks change over the years. In the meantime, we’re all just scratching along, doing the best we can and hoping that it’s enough. We do it because we love them unconditionally, and that’s the same whether you’re mum or dad, or even something else altogether. In comparison with that, they can look all they like.

Accompanying image by skalekar1992 from Pixabay.