Stop the Train, I Wanna Get Off!

Things just kind of turn out the way they are meant to turn out, don't ya think?
It's been a crazy week in my mind. Between working on an article for Portland Family magazine about single parenting and actually living as a single parent this week (Thank you, Lord, for my husband!), the Memory Train is moving at 90 miles an hour.

My piece for PDX Family is due in a week and a half, and deals with the assumptions, stereotypes, and otherwise interesting comments/questions from well-meaning but not always tactful people. I thought I had my single parenting years (all 9 of them) safely tucked away in the memory vault, planning to release them slowly over a bottle of wine someday with the right people.

What was I thinking?

I asked Wolf his impressions of our one-parent family years while on the phone with he and Therapist B. yesterday morning. Not surprising to B. nor I, Wolf harbors some resentment (I guess as any teenage boy would hold towards his mother) about the what-for's and why's of our situation back then. Those years were tumultuous, stressful, and probably not the way I would have planned to parent had I known better what I was doing. But I did the best I could with a child who demanded constant attention, if only from a subliminal place, without the support of a partner. At least for the early years.

Wolf sees his younger life as a blur, a collage of confusing people and events and places that all combine to make up "us". He does not claim to remember much about his childhood alone with me, and to be fair, there were a lot of moves, transitions, and otherwise difficult-to-understand concepts of which I am not particularly proud.

We were, and are, pretty inter-connected, Wolf and I. For better or worse, much of his inherent character traits were created by my parental design, and while we are a family in every sense of the word, the four of us, there still remains that piece of single-parenthood. I sense it every time Wolf gets angry at me, directly, when I recall past events from his early years, and when he questions about his birth father, my former husband.

So the memory train keeps shooting down the tracks, I keep writing and listening to single parents who, it seems, have "been there done that", and we all keep reminding ourselves that we were damn lucky to be where we are with people who put up with us and our baggage.

It's a wild ride, but I don't know if any of us would change it. Much.