Single Parenthood & I: The Valentine's Day Trap

This Friday is Valentine's Day - you're welcome - and my kids are reaching an age when this could start to mean something different, to them.

My children, it’s fair to say, have a slightly different idea of what ‘love’ means to a lot of other children. Their mother and I had separated in terms of being a couple by the time younger was born, and the times during which they’ve seen me happily partnered—and the consequential changes that this brings me in terms of my general demeanour—have been scant over the years since. Put simply, they haven’t seen the standard, domestic life of a couple in a relationship very much. Not from me, at least; not very much, and certainly nothing like as much as I would ever have wanted.

This manifests itself in several different ways. Every now and again, though I have noted increasingly rarely in recent years, one or other of them has occasionally expressed their desire for the four of us to live together as a family again. They understand that this won’t be happening and that it can’t happen, but on occasion I still see or hear it, whether in a brief mention from one of them or through a picture of ‘family’ drawn at school which shows the four of us still together.

How on earth do you even begin to explain the complexities of human relationships to children of this age? They’ve seen their father lonely and sad—there’s a mask that I wear at times, but I can’t help if it has slipped slightly at times and that has become briefly visible—too many times in the past. I’ve raised them with love and compassion at the front and centre of their worldviews, but there are swathes of it that they don’t understand.

They certainly already have firm opinions. Younger went through a period of wanting to marry a specific tree that he likes on the walk to school. To be fair, the way he would hug it as we walked past it every morning, he was at least heartfelt with his emotions. Because he likes small, cute things, he has also previously informed me of his desire to have babies of his own at the earliest possible opportunity. I have had to explain before that this really might not be the wisest idea, but fortunately he seems to have gone quiet on this subject recently, regardless.

His class is a thrilling hotbed of romantic intrigue. At least once a week I get a full rundown of who has a crush on who—he’s seven, for God’s sake—and he even emerged from his classroom on one particular afternoon to excitedly tell me that someone has a crush on him. When pushed on the subject, he admitted that he didn’t know who it was because they were in Reception class. “I… think you might be a bit… old for her?”, was my response. This was not a conversation that I was expecting to have with my own kids yet.

Older has a bestie who is a girl. She is a Ukrainian refugee, and they’ve been inseparable at school for almost three years now. I still remember the first day we saw her. We’d been informed by the school that this would be happening, so he’d been sent to school with strict instructions to make her feel welcome and at home, since she’d already had to travel a long way to be here and may be a little frightened.

He came good on that. She didn’t speak any English at the time, so they made noises at each other in the playground until she caught up with that. Three years on, they’re inseparable. We walk home with her and her mum every day, and every time the last thing he does before we part is to run over to her and give her a huge hug. They make each other birthday cards, and he is forever trying to spend his own pocket money on her, just because he wants to. It’s the way he’s programmed, and I’m immensely proud of this side of him.

But this is, or at least could potentially be, a love triangle, because at school they form a triumvirate in class with another girl (I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I probably shouldn’t be encouraging ‘throuples’ at that age, but times are changing and I often feel as though I don’t know what’s accepted and what isn’t, these days). I don’t know enough about the machinations of their relationship to comment much further on that, but I do know for sure that I have been asked to buy two Valentine’s Day cards by older, this year.

I am allowing this because they are nine years old, and because their perception of love hasn’t been corroded by the realities of the complexities of human beings. They’re not cynical, and I don’t want them to be, but I can see the potential for controversy on the 14th. Friday afternoon’s walk home could turn out to be eventful.

Older has told me already that he never wants to get married, and while I would always support anyone who didn’t want to do so, I do feel an more than a slight undercurrent of sadness over the likelihood that this opinion may have even been formed in no small part because what he has seen of the very concept of adult relationships has at times been so dysfunctional.

Sex is a topic that hasn’t come up yet, although there have been questions that have bordered upon it. “Daddy”, asked older kid one evening a couple of weeks ago after we’d been talking about why he looks so much like me while his brother doesn’t, “I have a question; if I’m made half of mummy’s DNA and half made of your DNA but I grew inside mummy, how did your DNA get in there?”

Now, I’m an extremely open-minded type of guy. No hang-ups about sex here, I can assure you. But that question was a little too biological for him at his age right now and I had to deflect, not because I was embarrassed or anything like that, but really because I couldn’t think of an answer off the top of my head that didn’t at some point involve the word “spunk”. That question will have to be answered another day.

I hope that my children get to experience love in all of its varying ways. I know that there will probably be times when they’re heartbroken and need consoling, and I hope that they will find the complete nourishment from being in love that I have felt, it sometimes feels too briefly, in the past. I have no particular interest or lack of interest in being a grandfather, though I do also feel that they should have at least some time living as adults before embarking on an adventure like that.

I know full well just how complicated adult relationships can be, but there is a glimmer of light. Of late, they’ve been starting to see something more positive from their father in this respect. They’ve even already commented on how different I am when she’s around. That’s a whole other story, of course, and one that I’m not so inclined to talk about here. But it offers hope of something approaching normality, or at least something that looks more like normality than they’ve experienced throughout their lives so far.

I’m prepared to learn from them. They both know their own minds, which is more than could have been said for me at too many points in the past. And while adults can wrap themselves in knots over Valentine’s Day, for older kid it’s all pretty obvious; he loves his friends, the 14th February is when you show people that you love them, and so you get them each a card. If only we could all see the world with such simple, targeted, clarity. And what about me, this Valentine’s Day? Well, the best I can say about that, reader, is that if all else fails I’ll just make noises at her. It seemed to work for my nine year-old.

Accompanying image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay.