How to Be a Single Parent in 20 Easy Steps!
According to me, a person who is single and also sometimes a parent
1. Get everyone you know to say how sorry they are about your divorce because these apologies will ensure that people feel guilted into bringing you cheese casseroles and great gifts, like half-empty tubes of children’s toothpaste.
2. Become friends with other single parents. It is important to create community at this time. Do not become friends with single parents who seem like they have their shit together. They are terrible and liars. Become friends only with the ones who seem very tired or very angry or, ideally, very both.
3. Order Domino’s six-cheese pizza for dinner through the app. It’ll earn you points and save you time. Time is really important now. There is never enough and you will always be late. In fact, you’re late for something right now. No, I don’t know what. I’ve got my own calendar to manage.
4. Be sure that you and your ex cannot agree on anything, including the best gender for your child’s swim instructor or how many 3D Immersive Maker LEGO summer camps you should sign your child up for so you can keep working your shitty job year-round. It’s only your salary now!
5. Use grocery store points to fill up on discounted gas over the weekend because you will definitely be making 5–6 extra trips during the week to the other parent’s house when your child forgets something essential to their life’s happiness, such as the birthday card they made for their stuffed squid named Steve.
6. Get comfortable routinely lying to your child. For example, “Your daddy IS the best” and “Sure, the way Daddy does braids is definitely how braids are normally supposed to be and not constructed with the sole intention of creating mayhem for me to detangle for an hour on a Friday night while you howl in pain.”
7. Develop some kind of self-care routine. Be sure the activities can be completed in three-minute intervals. Acceptable options include power-walking angrily around slow couples on the sidewalk, cursing out people who take too long to go on green, eating Cheese Whiz straight from the jar, and crying at old Taylor Swift music videos.
8. Live on your own for at least a few months before realizing it is totally impossible to do this by yourself and plan to shack up with the next available single person who is willing to pick your long hair out of his various crevices in the shower and help with all the chauffeuring you now have to do.
9. Apologetically keep reminding your child’s teacher to send home duplicates of everything, including the school’s monthly lunch menu, because it was Taquito Tuesday yesterday, dammit, and it would have been nice to know you didn’t need to make lunch for your kid on top of the 37 other things you have to do in the morning.
10. Forget what adult human contact feels like. Instead, become accustomed to sticky hands and ice-cube feet and glitter all over the goddamn place, including in your bed, whose sheets you JUST CHANGED OMG. No, I don’t know where the glitter is coming from. It just is. Rub it on your torso if you’re craving some extra stimulation.
11. Do not go on vacations anymore because kids don’t sleep in and won’t eat the food they are served and yell at you in the pool and require a seven-seat minivan to transport and nobody will help you, but everyone will definitely judge you. Besides, who has time for vacation??
12. Imagine falling down the stairs and slowly dying with your neck broken, the fire department only two blocks away, your life in your precious toddler’s hands, whose best guess at your 220 house number is 4. On the bright side, if you die, you’ll have a pretty good excuse for being late.
13. Contemplate getting a cat for some semblance of companionship, but decide against it because who wants to be cleaning out a litter box every day?
14. Purchase a bunch of parenting books from Amazon, and pay extra to have them shipped in one day; two days is too slow to reach the place on the shelf where the books will sit for the next year because, lol, do you really think you’ll have time to read?? Books with titles like “no drama” or “calm” work especially well for setting your glass of wine on next to the toilet.
15. Stop shaving your legs. What’s the point? Your child will eventually come to admire your long flowing locks. This will also save you time. Seriously, what are you still doing here? You are late for that thing!!
16. Create an imaginary competition with the other parent in which you are always just missing the podium by a few tenths of a point. Promise yourself you will parent harder and faster in the future.
17. Breathe a sigh of relief when you drop your child off at school or the other parent’s house. Revel in the release from responsibility and the temporary reprieve from “guess what guess what guess what guess what guess what MOM guess what.” Get drunk at noon! Nap after 4 pm! Eat cheese for dinner! You are a free woman!
18. Miss your child terribly when they are gone. Write in your journal, weep, look at old baby photos, smell their dirty laundry you haven’t had time to wash, try to catch up on the 60 hours of work you missed somehow while you were parenting, stress-eat cheese.
19. Hang on. My kid needs another effing snack.
20. Repeat, every 2–3 days or every other week, for the next 10–15 years. You’ve got all the time in the world.
