fiction

How to single mother

From the Slow Canoe Live Journal, Lessons.

First, breed young and fast, with someone whose voice makes your self-esteem weak, and your knees part. If possible, make your romantic choices based on sub-consciously acting out your childhood traumas. That way you can, unlike your parents, get things right this time. By doing everything exactly the same.

It is important that you never learn any manly skills, such as home maintenance, money-earning or passive aggression. Agree with your husband when he says it is silly for you to work. He’s right. What skills do you have?

Focus your efforts on being thin. Know that it is your flaws that make you unlovable, and when you are finally perfect, you will be loved.

Every morning, bake sugar-free muffins for breakfast and hand-roll organic sushi for your child’s packed lunch. Do not eat them. Or anything, if possible. Coffee is fine. You want to be as anxious as possible to help along the thinness.

Join the PTA. Craft helpful emails to other school mothers with tips on how to prevent the spread of head lice, or on how toxic TV is for children’s brains. Tsk and shake your head when you see a toddler on an iPad.

When your single mother friends confide in you how it feels to be a single mother, groan and tell them that—after your husband was away last weekend and you had the kids by yourself!—you know exactly how it feels.

Then, when you are particularly vulnerable (perhaps after giving birth or a breast cancer diagnosis) the relationship should end, suddenly but not—if you had truly paid attention—surprisingly.

You should now begin to ugly-cry into pillows, and drink heavily in the evenings. On the nights that you manage to not buy a bottle of wine, make cocktails out of fruit liquors leftover from your 21st. Call them desperitos. Laugh, despite it all.

When the baby wakes for his breastfeed, calculate that his blood alcohol level must be similar to that of Ernest Hemingway’s when he wrote a whole book about really liking bullfighting.

Your children should learn, quickly, that “dinnertime” is a word of the past, like “toothbrush” and “nuclear family”. They should be instructed how to forage in the cupboards for survival. Occasionally spray their heads with tea tree oil to keep the nit population sluggish. “Go to your Netflix-mummy,” you will joke as you pass your toddler an iPad.

After some months, your home should be almost entirely in darkness. Finally, when you and your children are huddled around a single candle, admit you need help. Have a Facebook conversation about lightbulbs with men you have seen wear cargo pants at least once. After just seven trips to Kmart you should own every type of lightbulb in the goddam shop, and a step-ladder. Your children will gaze at you with a mixture of confusion and pride as you stand victorious on the ladder, arms outstretched like Christ, and shout: Let there be light!

To celebrate your small victory, inappropriately culturally appropriate the voice of African-American women you saw on Jerry Springer while wagging school as a teenager, and talk about yourself, out loud, in the third person. Uh huh. Mama got this.

But, the moment you think everything is under control is the moment the proverbial rubbish bag should burst. Tell me this, you must cry to the fat, yellow moon: what day is bin day?

By now the lawn should have grown so high that it obscures the house. See a dog-shaped form in the grass. (Vaguely recall owning a dog.) You will have a big decision to make. Move house or learn to mow the lawn?

When the moving men arrive, ask them to look out for a dog.

Give yourself a challenge. Your first attempt at camping alone with the children should end in someone sobbing so hard they wet their pants, and a three hour drive home at midnight.

Change your sodden pants.

When the car starts making a funny noise, ring your mechanic. He will ask you questions about oil and you should reply with questions of your own. “Like, olive or coconut?”

Eating will now seem like a strange habit. You will finally be bone-thin but the love you assumed would follow this perfection has not materialised.

Consider the fact that your entire belief system is wrong. Blame your mother. No, wait—your father! Realise that both those assholes have blood on their hands. Look at your children in dawning horror. Oh, God! you should cry: don’t be me. And—this is important—don’t be your father, either.

At your therapists insistence, you must begin to exercise. You should feel faint after doing one push-up. Despite yourself, you should start to not hate it. Then, oddly, to like it. Then, to need it. After a few months, prod your arm in alarm and say, “What the hell are those hard lumps under my skin?”

Try emulating a single mother in an American movie. Dye your hair blonde and become sassy. Use your overt sexuality to make teenage cashiers blush. Deliberately bend over to pick up rubbish in the front garden when workmen drive past. When they whistle, make a joke out-loud to yourself, using the inappropriately appropriated voice. Uh huh, Mama still got it.

Give yourself a challenge. Grit your teeth and remove all your body hair from the nose down. Practise lying in positions that hide the crinkly skin on your stomach. When push comes to thrust, you should be simultaneously thrilled and terrified by the sight of a penis that is not your ex-husbands. Do not die when your childless lover says your nipples “have character”.

Eventually, you should stop hating all your married friends. Those jerks. Forgive them when they groan and tell you that, after their husband was away last weekend, they know exactly how it feels to be a single mother. Don’t blame them. They don’t get it. Not yet, anyway.

With other single mothers, place dibs on your hot, married man-pals and bunker down to wait out their marriages.

By now, you will have enough energy that you should be able to reintroduce old-fashioned concepts like “bedtime” and “school”. The dog will turn up. And a cat.

You should now remember that you have a cat.

Give yourself a challenge. Take the kids hiking and camping alone. Carry your toddler up a mountain on your back, clamouring barefoot and gasping, like Gollum, over boulders. “Good work, Mummy,” he will say, kissing the back of your sweaty neck. “Really good work.”

At night-time, erect the tent, and build the fire. Teach yourself to pop beer-caps with a spoon, as the children sleep nestled into your flanks like cubs. Above you, bone-white gum branches will point, like skeleton fingers, at the flurry of stars spread across the vast, black sky, as the lips of your children part with each breath.

Watch a possum clawing her way up the trunk, her baby on her back, the silver leaves rustling in the dark quiet.

Uh huh. Mama got this.