A Parent's Love

I was at work the other day and I walked into a conversation that I had no interest in participating in.  So I went about my business until (and I knew it would happen) one of the girls looked at me and asked me what I thought.  Now I am the sort of a girl that has an opinion, many opinions.  When I was younger, I would have gladly shared my opinion even if someone didn't ask me but things changed as I got older.  Do I still have strong opinions?  Absolutely.  I just understand when and where to share them.  I think of both the pros and cons of indulging in these conversations.  Sometimes the conversation is not worth the inevitable debate that will come from it.  The question you ask?  Do I think that two parents are needed to raise a child?

Now here's just a little back story.  I was a single parent of a beautiful little girl for the first seven years of her life and I wouldn't give up a single moment spent with her as a single parent.  Did I plan on being a single mother?  No, no one does but I think I always knew I would be.  Her biological father was not the prime choice for a life partner but at the time he suited my needs.  When I met him, I was a nineteen year old kid who had just come out of the hardest year of my life.  What he gave me, I needed but time is a funny thing.  I grew up when I saw that funny looking pink line at two o'clock in the morning after drinking whiskey sours all night and I kept growing up as she grew inside of me.  The things that I once needed from him I relearned how to do them for myself.  When she was eighteen months old, I told him to leave because I knew it was better for both my daughter and myself.  There was nothing inside of me that having the two of us live in an unhappy marriage that was good for my kid.  So I took on all the responsibility of raising this child.  I took on the long nights of crying, sitting in a steamed bathroom when her little body wouldn't stop coughing.  I figured out childcare and how to feed her on a very tiny budget.  I learned how to balance a full time job with being a full time parent.  I wiped her every tear, loved her every laugh, kissed every skinned knee.  I watched every play she would put on randomly and sat at every tea party she ever threw because I was her mommy.  We were a team and still are a team to this day even though soon she will go off into the world.

I'm an open book for the most part.  You can ask me anything you want and I will answer you in some fashion.  I have gotten this question before and honestly it's an absurd debate to me.  There is no right way to raise a child as long as you love them, provide for them, protect them.  It doesn't matter if there is two or one or three for that matter.  It doesn't matter if it's two women or two men or two monkeys.  All that matters is that you love and adore your child.  Not to repeat myself but it wasn't like I planned on being a single parent.  It's just where my life took me.  I love every moment of my daughter even now as she becomes a teenager and I become the enemy.  The relationship that grew between us was and is something beautiful and unique.  I was a kid when I had her so in a lot of ways we grew up together.  The relationship that we have I don't have with either of my parents.  Is it because there were two of them?  No, of course not but there is a different dynamic when the work is split between two people.  Single parents are both the mother and the father, the one who praises and punishes, the giver and the taker, the shoulder and the shield.  When you can play those two things off each other, the child will always see one parent as one thing or the other.  As the sole provider, you play both roles.

When my daughter was seven years old, I met my husband.  Did I think that he would become this?  No, I had moved on from the whole happily ever after, white fences idea.  I had accepted my role in life, my place in this world.  I was this girl's mother and that was it.  I was going to raise her, watch her go off into the world, hope for a couple phone calls a week from her, and buy a bunch of cats.  And this guy came along and flashed his pretty blue eyes at me, reigniting that hope inside of me that I could find a partner to live the rest of my days out with.  Five years later, we've been happily married for two years now and my seven year old is now a full blown teenager.  I've seen both sides of this coin.  I've been that single mother, trying to get by, struggling to be everything for this little girl.  And now we're a family, both of us taking on the struggles of raising a daughter.  It's nice.  It's nice to have someone there to have my back, to discuss things with, to figure out how to do this beside.  He knows when I need to step away and I know when he needs to take a break.  He knows when not to push her, knows how to reason with her when I fail.  As most mother/daughter relationships, we butt heads.  We are too much alike.  I know in her younger years she took to heart so much of me.  I both love it and fear it but I know she will be just fine.  Her unyielding stubbornness will carry her on through.

So I told these girls all that though in a much simpler way.  One brought religion into it and honestly religion has nothing to do with it.  Love is universal and will never belong to just one organization.  Love belongs to all of us regardless if we believe in religion or not.  I have been the only one in the audience for my daughter's life almost as long as I've been in the crowd now.  I was just as good as a mother to her then as I am now.  Having two parents or one doesn't make or break your kid.  Granted, there are a ton of situations out there and I know not all kids with single parents don't get the best deal.  That being said, kids growing up with two can have it just as rough.  What is important here is simple:  Love.  You love your children.  You water them with knowledge and kindness and you let that love bloom.  Life doesn't always work out the way you think it should, the way you want it to.  Sometimes life makes choices for you but you can always choose love.  I love my little girl.  Whether I was single or not, my love for her never faltered.  It just made us stronger.

Tiny Pieces

Moments, that’s all that life is.  It’s just a collection of moments that both make us, break us, change us.  If I could recount every moment of my life, maybe it would all make sense but instead I just have flashes.  Flashes of light in my head where I can remember.  Somewhere in that flash tiny pieces of my life came together and something made sense.

There was the moment I met my daughter for the first time, all bloody and covered in goo.  All I could see was her beautiful little face, this little face that I made, that lived inside of me for nine months. 
Then the moment is gone.  There was the moment I stood at the end of the aisle, looking at the man that I was about to marry, standing so tall with tears streaming down my face.  I didn’t notice the people watching us, couldn’t care less about the white dress that I never thought I would wear.  I just remembered that moment locking eyes with him and nothing else.  The moment was gone but these moments as I acquire them make me.  

In every smile sits all the love and hate I’ve ever known, in every tear I shed, in every word that flows from these hands.  Somewhere in between these moments, I have lived.  Somewhere in this vast world, there is a record of my every moment but the brain can only take so much so we take our bits and our pieces and tuck them away so as to not forget what really matters.  We make a clip show and we continuously play the reel over and over again, adding new moments the older we get.  I see me as a little girl in the bathroom with my mother, watching her brush her long dark hair, thinking that I wanted to be as pretty as her one day.  I hear my little brother and I playing together in the leaves on a cold Autumn Day, jumping into that big pile of brown and red over and over again, not caring about the bugs that are attaching themselves to us.  I feel my father carrying me up to my bed after a long day, pretending like I'm asleep so he wouldn't put me down and winking at my siblings as we went up the stairs.  Between all those moments, I grew bigger each time, learned more, changed from one to the next.

And for every moment that makes me smile, there were moments that shattered the core of me.  There were moments that terrified me, moments that I wish I could forget, but in these most painful memories I found my light.  I see me crying on the floor with a bottle next to me, wishing the world would go away.  I feel hands on me that I will never be able to erase.  I hold a child in my arms who doesn't understand.  In these flashes, I understood what I lost but it doesn't erase all that I have gained.  I learned to find the broken parts of me, to stitch them into the better parts, to put the puzzle back together.  Even the hardest piece has it's place.

Moments, coming and going, being triggered by the smallest of events, teach us how to live, how to breathe, how to move on.  We remember the smiles that warmed our faces, giving us hope that those feelings can last forever.  We hold tight to them, wrapping them around us like a blanket because we may need them on a rainy day.  When those dark days come, it's those moments of light that shine bright.  Along the way, we learn how to live.  In between all of these moments, both good and bad, we exist.  Life happens in between the births and the deaths, the light and the dark, but we need these moments of glory, of failure to keeps us on our way.