Self-Care for Single Moms, Side Chicks & Villains
Introducing the Shadow Work Series
It’s Monday. I’m less than 12 hours off a solo turn-around road trip to New Orleans to support my bestie and I’ve set alarms for 5:30 and 6 am. I rise with the latter and am already 30 minutes behind on my daily commitment to writing for an hour every day. Since I have this weird mind control over my weight (but, somehow, not yet the rest of my life,) and had been feeling pretty okay about my physical body as of late, I decided I could skip the recently futile (but frustratingly persistent) hour’s worth of attempts to wake up with enough time to meditate and do yoga in the living room or pack a gym bag for a lunchtime workout at the office fitness center and food at my desk afterward.
The living room yoga scenario meant grabbing lunch near the office. The office fitness center scenario meant adding a trip to the grocery store during the hour between dropping my son to school and commuting to work on time, after angrily pausing my sacred morning half-sleep/ half-meditation ritual to yell at the 17-year-old about the fact that he fell asleep FaceTiming his girlfriend again last night and so his phone isn’t charged to receive my 6:30 am wakeup call and how I should not still be waking him up, and after making his breakfast and my coffee, taking the dog out and rushing out the door, always 5 minutes too late and with the feeling that I’ve forgotten something important.
So yeah, I’m writing at 6 am and it’s really just organizing Google Drive and creating desktop folders and transcribing voice memos I’d recorded while driving home from New Orleans. But the next thing I know it’s almost 8 am and I need to leave for work in half an hour! (This week the kid’s out of school for winter break. That means I can leave at an hour later than usual and bypass much of the typical traffic. It means no 6:30 am wakeup calls or moody morning teenager, no cold walks with the pooch, and no dangerous Atlanta morning traffic battles. It means instead, sneak-calling repeatedly from work to whisper-yell, “Get up! Take the dog out! Eat breakfast!”)
So I scramble and rush, fight off a strong wave of fuck-this-shit, and manage to make it to work only 5 minutes late. I run into the ladies room and my period has started. But whatev. When you’re single at my age, you grow accustomed to the constant vacillation between fear of pregnancy and fear of menopause. So yay. Plus, how could I have forgotten when the full moon’s tomorrow?
I round the corner to the office door and my work mate’s sitting on the floor looking sheepish. She’s forgotten her key. I’m glad I’d fought the fuck-it. She’s sweet. And entirely capable, but I feel this auntie-like protectiveness over her. Anyway, it’s 9:10 am and we’re both there looking at each other like, here we go again.
From then until 6 pm, I do a clumsy waltz of why-is-this-my-life and be-grateful-and-make-the-most-of-it while chitchatting with my sweet, young co-worker about pocket foods, macarons, fonts, and paper finishes. Sometime around lunch, I rip open a surprise, belated, additional Valentine’s Day gift delivery from my married boyfriend. It’s two beautiful dresses and I wonder, “Did he buy her the same ones?”
By 6:10 pm I’m in my car firing up the vape pen and Pandora when I get a text from my beloved teen. He wants… no, he desperately needs a grocery store sub from the one grocery store that doesn’t exist near my hood. I’d been anxiously awaiting the chance to go straight home, clean up, and write. But alas, a single mom’s work is never done.
At 7:30 pm I’m home. I don’t even unsnap my bra before I’m simultaneously cleaning and fussing about things my kid should’ve cleaned while I was gone. “Put on a coat, please,” I say. “I need your help taking out the trash, recycling, and Candler.” “Oh yeah,” he replies as I spray chemical solutions hither and yon, “Candler pooped on the floor earlier.”
12:42 am finds me barely able to keep my eyes open as I hammer out disjointed remnants of the stories that had haunted me all day. I’d cleaned my apartment, washed the dog and assembled an Ikea-style (few directions and many, many screws) bedframe for a bed that I was then too tired to make.
Tuesday, I call in sick.
In the stories I create of life, I’d been casting myself most frequently as the villain. I’m not sure whether I’ve been more hated as the lesbian, the side chick, or the single black female. Either way, it’s got me thinking about not only the stories we write and tell, and the realities we create from them, but also the roles we give ourselves in these tales and what that means about us.
What can we learn about the roles we play in the stories we write about life? Are we always the hero, victim, outcast, or villain? And why? How easy is it to write a different character for yourself? And how do we prevent feeling typecasted?
I believe it’s by realizing that each of us is the writer, director, and producer of the art that is life.
One thing’s for certain, however: I am the author of my own destiny. And I’m proactively becoming a better writer; creating more stories with heroes, transformed and vindicated villains, and happy endings. I’m penning more pieces with someone like me as the lead.
First, though, I had to do the dirty work. Stay tuned for the Shadow Work Series, inspired by my journey:
- Butt Clench — Healing the Root Chakra after Trauma
- Yoni Egg — All the things no one tells you
- The Single Mom’s Guide to Sex & Dating
- Practical Self-Care for Real Women
- The Single Mom Superiority Complex
- The Motherhood Hierarchy
- & More (In no particular order)
All my writing is practice. I’m a student earning a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing for Entertainment. And all of my writing is difficult… not in the traditional sense of the word, but in that even fiction exposes the author in her most vulnerable state: truth. I appreciate the comments, kind words, feedback and encouraging notes I’ve been receiving. I’m particularly interested in the views of fellow moms as you read my stories. Please keep the constructive criticism coming and let’s stay in touch!