Don’t call me Shirley

Surely I am not a “single mother”, since my ex-husband lives a few blocks away and shares custody of the kids.

Skip this paragraph if you find explications of custody arrangements tedious. I have the children every Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday they come to my house after school and then go home with their father when he picks them up after work–at around 7, usually–and spend the night there. Weekends we alternate. I made it explicit in the divorce agreement that my ex would be officially responsible for them every other Friday afternoon on “his” weekend, so that I can skip town to see my boyfriend, should I so desire, on Thursday evenings…but if I’m around on my weekend off, they come home to me that Friday as well. Sick days, snow days, holidays, summer days, all day, every day, are mine. This is not fifty percent, or even close, and I am paid child support as if we shared custody equally, but I don’t care. There is no such thing as a divorce agreement that both parties will find utterly fair. You choose what’s most important, and you let the rest slide; I wanted the kids with me more, and I therefore agreed to a custody agreement that might, on the surface, seem slightly skewed.

I’m not asking for sympathy or shared indignation–not at all. On the contrary, I want to make it clear that I knew exactly what I was getting into. When we separated, my younger son was in first grade. I had taken care of both kids full time since they were born. I could not fathom being without them for half of every week. Of course, I know now that kids–not to mention their clingy mothers–can and do adapt, and that mine would have been fine had my husband pushed for truly shared custody, or had I gotten a full time job and hired a babysitter, or what have you. At the time, however, I couldn’t imagine anything different. When everything went tits-up, I clung to the kids, and to my identity as their full-time mother, with desperate intensity.

But I don’t consider myself a single mother, not by a long stretch. To me, a single mother is someone like my mom–100% custody of the kids, virtually no child support, and a full time job. I don’t have any of those things.

Neither do I have a career. When asked what I do for a living, I mumble and fidget and twitch. This is actually an improvement; I used to tell everyone I did “nothing” for a living; since the divorce, I’ve tried not to be so cavalier. My kids used to think that their father worked and I stayed home to take care of them; they now know that both their father and I work, and both of us take care of them. I work more than I did when I was married, and he takes care of them more than he did when we were married; divorce has smoothed over the difference in our rôles. Still, there is a difference, and I persist in thinking of my ex-husband as a scientist and of myself as someone who has not quite managed to get her professional life (such as it is, or is not) properly underway. I have no one to blame for this but myself. I could blame the children, I guess. Technically it’s probably their fault.

Several weeks ago I decided to do what I have been talking about doing for years–namely, leave the house and go to the library on our town’s college campus, in order to work, uninterrupted by the telephone, undistracted by the internet, for three hours a day.

Three hours! It sounds like so little. It sounds like nothing at all. Sitting at a carrell with books and pencils and notebooks, writing in longhand, feels familiar and pleasant. I didn’t own a laptop in graduate school, and spent entire days in the library as a matter of course, reading, doodling, translating, taking notes, writing papers. The college library I presently haunt shares a kind of funky seventies-busy-carpet-weird-wooly-wall-hanging ambiance with the library I preferred in grad school, though the grad school library was much more densely populated. Where are all the kids studying these days? At home with their laptops, I suppose, while texting and inventing apps and hurtling along the information superhighway at speeds we old fogies can hardly imagine.

I thought, at first, that three hours was a little on the light side. Roald Dahl wrote for four hours a day, I read somewhere–which sounded like a pretty sweet deal. But given the years of sloth I was up against, I figured it was better to aim a little low; anyway, the real key was getting into a routine–putting on pants and shoes, leaving the house, combing my hair, and the like. Once I broke my Oblomovian habits, it would be easy to raise the bar by tacking on another hour or two. Best of all, I’d still have plenty of time left over for email, dicking around on the internet, talking on the phone, running errands with consoling-windows friend, and so on. I have from 8:30 until 3:30 every school day to play with. Carving a mere three hours out of that vast expanse of time should be a piece of cake.

It has been nearly impossible.

It’s very easy, when you work from home and on an irregular schedule, to think that you are the reason you never get anything done.  If only I were more disciplined, I have told myself during every single long dark night of the soul since my twenties, I’d have filed my taxes on time. Or sent in that form that’s overdue, or called that person back, or made (and kept) that doctor’s appointment, returned those library books, written those thank-you notes. I still lie awake tossing and turning, telling myself that it’s my own damnable laziness that’s kept me from turning my dissertation into a book, publishing more, writing more, studying more, learning more languages, and so on and so forth until I either fall back into the sleep of the wicked and unjust, or else morning comes.

The children were convenient scapegoats for many years–who can get anything done when preschool only lasts two hours? Then along came the divorce, an excellent alibi. But now, I told myself the other week, I have no plausible excuse. I planned to start Monday. Three hours, hell or high water. And three on Tuesday, and Wednesday, and so on. No excuses.

First, the good news. I have gotten to the library nearly ever day since I resolved to start going. I took Sunday off, because my boyfriend and his kids were here, and we’d had five kids and four grownups to supper the night before. But I even worked on Saturday, and the feeling I was going for–the peace and quiet and concentration, the written pages piling up, something that has been hanging over my head for six long years actually almost finished–these are all wonderful things. I’ve been fierce about taking the time, I really have, and I’ve looked forward to it. And it has made me feel better about the rest of my day. The only problem is, there are too many things to fit into the rest of my day. And that’s just an ordinary day. The things that crop up, the massive time-sucks that come out of the blue and have to be coped with right away? They seem to occur once or twice a week without fail. And when you’re actually trying to consolidate three uninterrupted hours so that you can work, those interruptions really piss you off.

They’re not even interruptions, really. They’re what used to fill my life. Resenting them is not the answer, because even though I’m not a single mother, I’m the only fucking person around here who can cope with, say, a broken-down car. Yesterday was the first day I wanted, badly, to go to the library, and I couldn’t. The whole day went down the tubes, and I was angry and short with the children, who were very sweet, and today was hardly better, and tomorrow I have to spend the whole day on my taxes and the financial aid forms for my son’s school. Another day wasted, another day lost. And at the back of it all is this terrible thought: If I can’t even make space for three hours of work, how the fuck am I going to pull this whole thing–this life I want, this work I need to do, this money I need to make, this project I’ve got to get going on lest I completely forfeit all self-respect–off?  It’s not a rhetorical question. For so long I thought this was the answer. What if it isn’t, and what if I’m utterly screwed?

Spring break looms ahead–ten days off for the older son, then a week off for the younger one, beginning the day the older one goes back. There goes March.

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