Single Parenthood & I: The Morning Routine

For five days a week, the first two hours of my day are dominated by cat-herding. This is how it usually plays out.

Hello. My name is Ian. I am 52 years old and for five days a week, this is what I do in the mornings. I have two boys, aged seven and nine, and I am a single dad. I feel that I should add here that not a word of this has never happened.

6.30am: My alarm doesn't go off but I awaken with a grimace nevertheless. A quarter century of office work conditioned me to be awake at a certain time of day no matter what and even now my body clock works with the accuracy of an atomic clock for no more than six to six and a half hours sleep, meaning that my alarm set for 7.15 is merely an insurance policy, even though I've not set foot in an office for almost five years now. I'm not one for sitting in bed doomscrolling first thing in the morning, so I'm normally straight up and out of bed.

6.35am: I make too much coffee in an oversized mug with "I CAN'T ADULT TODAY" printed on the side of it, settle down at the kitchen table, and doomscroll until the kids get up.

7.05am: The sound of a wardrobe being pushed down the stairs. Ah, that'll be older getting up. The sound of a slightly smaller wardrobe being pushed down the stairs. Ah, that'll be younger getting up. They immediately settle down robot-like in front of the television. "Good morning, kids", I say to no reaction whatsoever. "GOOD MORNING, KIDS", I repeat at thrice the volume. Younger turns around, sticks his tongue out, and shouts, "BLARP!"

This is, so far as I'm aware, his first word of the day.

7.15am: The goddam bloody alarm on my phone goes off.

7.30am: It's time for the morning routine to start. I enjoy routine. It keeps me within the rails. I wander out into the kitchen, do the small pile of washing up from the night before, put four slices of bread in the toaster, pour cereal and milk into two bowls and grab two of the plates that I've just washed up with a sigh at how briefly they were clean, putting them on the table with the toast, now buttered. (Pro-trip for people having a second kid - buy a four-slice toaster if you don't already have one; I guarantee you'll end up thanking me for this reminder. You've got until the younger one has got teeth.)

7.35am: While the kids are scarfing down their breakfast at a rate that leaves me silently questioning whether I gave them their dinner last night or not, I prepare their packed lunches. Blackcurrant jam for older, cheese for younger. Neither have spread, and yes, it does bother me the teachers may believe that I can't be bothered to butter their sandwiches of a morning. They go into the almost identical lunch boxes–goddam it Ian, you bloody idiot–with an apple, a sweet thing of some description, some carrot sticks or celery, a packet of crisps, and definitely no nuts and nothing nut-related.

7.45am: Make double sure that the right lunches are in the right lunch boxes and that the right lunch boxes are in the right bags. I once had a call from one of their schools over getting this wrong because doing so had caused such a commotion in the playground during break. The child concerned was subsequently warned as to his future behaviour over this. Nowadays when something like this does happen, they just don't eat it and complain loudly at me about it afterwards.

7.50am: It's shower time! But not for me. This is the one aspect of this whole palaver that has significantly improved in recent years. Older can now more or less clean himself but younger is still petrified of any water warmer than tepid, as well as cold water and soap, so it's still better for me to try and get him clean, though the pen marks that he inexplicably gets on his face at school usually prove too stubborn to completely remove.

8.00am: The kids more or less dress themselves nowadays, though even now I can never 100% guarantee that older won't appear wearing a tutu because he's somehow got it into his head that it's a non-uniform day. But just because they do dress themselves, this doesn't mean that they make a very good job of it. Older can do shirt buttons, but button alignment remains an issue. Younger may have his trousers on back to front and be wondering where the zip and clasp are, or occasionally I'll hear a muffled shout from upstairs because he's tried to push his head into one of the arm holes on his polo shirt and got it stuck there. These situations usually resolve themselves and by 8.10 they're lolling back in front of the television again, while I'm double-checking that neither of them have gym, which they both do twice a week, or forest school, which requires outdoor clothing for one of them once a week. I have a blackboard in the kitchen with this shit written on it. That it has come to this.

8.15am: Time for them to brush their teeth, an activity which they carry out while I stand outside the door barking, "Two minutes each at least, I'm timing you".

8.20am: Time to get their shoes and coats on, and their bags. It is also, therefore, time for older to announce that he'd forgotten that he needs to go to the toilet really badly and that no, it can't wait until he gets to school. I receive an email from Substack telling me that I earned £8 yesterday and die a little on the inside.

8.25am: Time for the school run. Because West Sussex County Council persist with infant, primary and high schools, even though there's only two years between them they go to different schools. Our house is halfway between the two, which necessitates a thirty minute circular walk to both of them and then home.

8.30am: "Daddy, I have a question." Every morning, as regular as clockwork. Older usually dominates this part of the conversation, and among his more memorable questions have included, "Do cars ever leave sparks on the ground behind them when they go up the road?" (not if they’re working properly), "What would happen if a bird flew into an aeroplane engine?" (I knew the answer to that one), and "What's the most famous colour?" (I did not know the answer to that one). A lot of these questions involve diamonds, about which I know practically nothing.

But it's not all about the questions. Other topics of conversation that have piqued our interest over the last couple of years have included:

- Stripes the missing cat, who's lovely face adorns a missing poster attached to a telegraph pole that we walk past every morning. So far as the kids are concerned, that guy has been out hunting mice for a *long* time. RIP Stripes (unless you've done that "cats are bastards" thing of just fucking off to another family because their house looks warmer or something).

- The highly customised Range Rover in lurid purple with orange trim parked just up the road from older's school in an extremely dishevelled state. "What sort of person would own a car like that?", asked younger one morning. "I know the answer to that question, kiddo", I thought to myself, "but I'm not getting into a detailed conversation about what a drug dealer is". "Probably a DJ", I told him, while thinking, "I've known enough DJs in my life who were also drug dealers."

There was considerable excitement when the car disappeared for a few weeks but then reappeared, parked on the other side of the road and in an even worse state, with bits hanging off it and a huge crack in the windscreen. Sadly, it has now gone, apparently permanently, though I did take a photo of it which I'm not posting here because I don't want to end up on a hitlist.

- Footprints on the pavement like someone had dropped a can of paint, but with no other splashes to indicate that a can had actually been dropped, and which stopped as abruptly as they started about twenty yards up the road. "Ghost", was my explanation, without further elaboration.

- Telling the kids that if they don't pipe down I'll change both of their names to "Mister Stinky", which is usually greeted by both of them jumping up and down and shouting, "No, YOU'RE Mister Stinky" while for some reason pointing at me.

But I digress.

8.35am: We drop older at the bottom of the road that his school is on. It's 150 yards to the gate and he likes the feeling of freedom (spot the Gen X former latchkey kid dad). He runs the entire journey, stopping only to give us a flamboyant wave before disappearing through the gate. Younger and I continue to his school, with most of the journey taken up with him telling me the politics of his class (of which there are many), who's got a crush on who (again, surprisingly many), or how excited he is for the day (answer every day, "very"; hardly surprising, with all these crushes going on).

8.40am: Arrive at younger's school. They don't open the doors until 8.45 and no, they DGAF if it's raining so hard that it feels like being pelted with pebbles. The other mums and I stand under the tiny amount of shelter and complain about, in no particular order, the weather, the government, the fact that they never open the doors early, and the extremely obvious lies that our little darlings have been telling us about school.

False or fallacious suggestions that "tomorrow is a non-uniform day" are extremely popular, even though as parents we already know that actual non-uniform days are as rare as hens teeth unless the school are insisting that they dress up as Victorians, Romans, or whatever, and that they'd get immediately found out anyway. That's the thing about seven year olds; they're not very good at lying.

8.45am: Kiss younger on the cheek and tell him to "be good", and that I love him, and he waddles off into class. It's another little routine. Every night, the last thing they hear from me is, “Daddy loves you”. One of the curses of being an older father, I ponder to myself as I wander out towards the rear gate, is the realisation of just how much older than you are than practically everyone else in this space. Most of the teachers are young enough to be my children.

8.50am: They station teachers on every entrance and exit to the school at this time of the day, and as often as not I'm stopped by whoever is on there. Older did three years at this school, and younger is in his third now, so both them and I are familiar faces around here. I used to get concerned faces every once in a while, as though I needed to be treated with kid gloves because I was a middle-aged man getting divorced. It didn't always used to be without good reason.

But it is nice to stop and chat for a few minutes and I certainly know that they care. Putting two kids through school on your own is a pretty firm reminder of how much so many of them genuinely care. I cried in front of one of them once, after I lost my job (when I'd only been single dadding for a few months), and I got a hug and a reply of, "We're all team dad here". I'll never forget those words. Teachers are brilliant.

9.00am: Home! Ten minutes for a sit down, a quick run, and then some quick resistance band work. I'm trying to arrest the slide, if you must know. Now I have a five hour and fifty minute window of peace and tranquillity to write some words for (hopefully) money before I have to go pick them up and the noise starts up all over again.

9.30am: I sit down at my desk, open my laptop, and head straight for the Wikipedia page for "Diamonds" for the 400th time this academic year.