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Parenting

A day in the life of a single mom

Felicia Dewar, Edmonton mom and blogger at singlemomoftwo.com, kicks off our new blog with perspectives on single parenting over the month of March

By Felicia Dewar
A day in the life of a single mom

Welcome to our first At Our House blog post! Felicia Dewar, Edmonton mom and blogger at www.singlemomoftwo.com will be blogging for Today's Parent over the month of March. Please give her a warm welcome as she shares what life is like at her house.

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My life as a single mother can really be summed up by reviewing a succession of recent days. Last week my son's teacher's asked him, "Can you have your mom come to school with her power tools to help us with our science projects?"

I am not only the parent that does the field trips, in-class volunteering and extra-curricular shuttling, but I am also the one that built our shed this past summer, installed a cat door to our basement and WWE wrestles like mad before bed. But I digress; back to school.

What my son's teacher was really looking for was someone able to take the day off of work, interact positively with the students and be able to saw wood without losing any fingers (they do frown upon this in elementary schools...). Armed with my drill and my jigsaw, my son's classmates 'ooohed' and 'aaahed' upon my arrival. "Is that YOUR mom?" "Did she really bring a saw?", eyes wide with admiration beamed at my son.

Thankfully I knew the difference between a wood blade and a steel blade (I had to install my son's closet organizer and one of the bars was too long!), so apparently this made me the resident expert on all things power tools. Sweating every time I turned the jigsaw on, I refused to allow anyone to "help" — one wrong move and I would go from being the hero to a lawsuit.

Fast forward to the trip home in the car with my children and my son pops out this gem, "Mom, are you ever going to get married?!" (Am I a lost cause in my mid-thirties?!) Deep in thought I ruminated on my last date: a good looking fellow, good job, owns his house, great conversationalist....before the actual meeting. In person? Well, considering his hobby was "working out," that in his spare time he "worked out" and for fun he "went to the gym," I was left scrambling to find anything in common at all!

Once home I discovered that my youngest had peed in the vent, locked the cat out of the basement (litter box duty anyone?) and was currently battling his older brother for television dominance. A quick supper (okay, three suppers, my children are super picky), playtime and I was praying for bedtime. However, off to my Park Committee meeting (we've been waiting six years for a park), I alternated between sitting in the boardroom to mediating computer time with my kidlets, whom I dragged along. Home to tuck the kidlets into bed, I then had four hours of blogging, BlogWest conference planning and social media strategizing for my local MLA left to do.

I am sure my day sounds very familiar to most every parent and it should. After all, a single parent is first and foremost a parent or as I like to call us — multi-tasking machines. We just don't have the extra person to referee the fighting, take the day off of work, commiserate about a "parenting failure," help buy the groceries or plan for retirement. In my world, it is the lack of emotional support, someone who is always on your side, someone who wants to help you, help your children succeed that is the most difficult. My series on single parenting will take you into my world and the differences and similarities that we as parents share.

So, single parents out there: how do you juggle it all? Do you like the autonomy or wish you had someone to help share the load?

This article was originally published on Mar 07, 2012

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