I get a phone call every once in a while from single mother friends whose kids don’t want to go to their father’s house… not for the weekend, not for the holidays, not for Christmas. I honestly don’t know how to make it all better, and I understand the pain the moms go through.
Because the kids have to go, or the law might come down on you. It’s his turn, right? He’s their father, no matter what, right?
Maybe.
I think we all struggle with our children sometimes. A very dear friend of mine went so far as to admit that her three year old was being an asshole, the other day. I have friends who remind themselves that while they love their children always, sometimes they do not like the way their children are behaving. We struggle to keep our tempers, and sometimes we just can’t.
But what if it’s not just sometimes? What if you find yourself getting angry at your child every day? It could stem from depression, sleep deprivation, post partum depression, or the simple, overwhelming …read more
This article from Reuters brings tears to my eyes. “Battered Afghan wives opt for divorce instead of suicide“:
After regular beatings, torture and attempted murder by her husband, 35-year-old Zahra tried to burn herself to death to escape her marriage. Then she learned of a safer option: divorce.
I’ve been pondering this one for a while. New York Times has an article about it. An eight year old boy shot and killed his father and a boarder, his father’s friend. Deliberately. One victim was found outside the house. One was found inside–upstairs, in a bedroom.
I have no answers. Seems there’s a surfeit of anger out there, these days. The KKK is in resurgence… in Long Island. Baby Peter is beaten to death. And an eight year old kills his father and his father’s friend.
The Arizona boy is facing two counts… of premeditated murder. What on earth is going …read more
I don’t talk very often about the fact that my mom was a single mother for a while, back when I was a little thing. She was a waitress, and I’d spend the nights with Nanna and Herbert, and the days running around with my wonderful mom. I remember being scared of construction sites (I thought the cranes were gigantic monsters), I remember saying, “I’d like some sherbert, Herbert!” and shrieking hysterically about fifty bajillion times an evening. I remember going on adventures with my mom. She was always there and she was all I needed. When she found my …read more
I love reading Susan Palwick’s blogs. She’s a sci-fi writer,volunteer hospital chaplain, and random do-gooder whose words often spark some wild hope and debate within my own, tumultuous soul.
Please read today’s entry over at Improbable Optimisms: Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good:
This week at the hospital, I learned that dying, or learning that you’re going to die, isn’t the saddest thing in the world. The people weeping around your bedside are devastated, but that’s because you lived a full life, because you loved and were loved. Loving and being loved is cause for joy, even or especially in darkness.
The saddest …read more
If you’re a single mother because you were in a bad relationship, there’s a good chance your baggage has a tendency not to just open up at inopportune times, but to actually explode all over the place in an extravagant display of dirty laundry. I don’t know that I’ve ever written about this, but towards the end of my marriage, I was prescribed no fewer than four different anti-depressants to manage what the doc diagnosed provisionally as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
You know. What our soldiers over there are coming down with in droves.
There are some rumblings in Jolly Old England that girls are getting themselves knocked up so they can have a posh Council flat and live on the dole. If you scratch the surface of the blogosphere you can come across some pretty nasty, bitter blogs written by nasty, bitter men who seem to think that every single mum has got it in for the system, and we’re getting a free ride.
Thoughts have been swirling around in my brain all weekend. We don’t live in the best neighborhood, though it’s ‘up and coming’ and ‘transitional’ and its name has been cobbled together from a classier zip code… with a qualification tacked on at the end. A 33 year old woman was raped not far from here. In broad daylight. While another man held her three year old daughter.
I wish I could help that woman. I wish I could make it all go away, or tell her that everything’s going to be alright. But I can’t. The thing about violent crimes? They divide …read more
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