Together We Stand, Divided We Fall

I know why people who are unhappy stay together. I’ve unraveled the mystery. It isn’t because they are holding out hope that things will get better. On the contraire, they’re accepting of the fact that things in their marriage are bad. But they know that by splitting up there is something far more sinister in store… and that something is single parenting.

I’ve hunted alligators… I’ve undergone up to 30 cortisone injection in my head one sitting… I’ve had two C-Sections… I’ve worked three jobs and gone to school at the same time… But nothing, and I mean NOTHING, could have ever prepared me for life as a single mom.

Tonight I found myself staring at the popcorn on our ceiling, trying to decipher patterns. Meanwhile, Kuku had both the kids out front getting some fresh air. There were a million more productive things that I could be doing, but it was either this or sucking the carbon monoxide out of the tailpipe of my car.

The stay-at-home-mom is my new hero. A recent study showed that a stay-at-home-mom’s salary would be well over six figures… and I’ll be damned if she doesn’t earn every gosh darn penny. This isn’t easy work. I mean these little darlings are a handful. They piss. They poop. They cry. The whine. I love them to death, but I almost wish I had a time machine set to send me three years into the future when I’d actually have time to catch my breath.

Now the Fedster appears to realize the plight of a single parent, as he’s recently started taking both the baby and our 5-year-old in small increments. And now he’s learning that things aren’t always what they seem. For a long time, he believed that I struggled because I had no patience. That was until he had big mouth and little big mouth over for a pow wow in his teepee.

Call #1
“She hasn’t stopped crying since she got here. I’ll fix her little butt,” he said glumly.

Call #2
“I did it. She cried her self to sleep. I’m the MAN,” he said.

Call #3
“Come get this child NOW!” he shouted, echoing an angry plea I made to him via phone just a few weeks back.

Call #4
“She’s okay. False alarm,” he assured me.

Regardless I drove over to his apartment to retrieve Screaming Mimi. You see, the baby is temperamental, as well as calculating. She knows your weaknesses and goes for the jugular every time. And once she gets started, the big one takes the opportunity to kick a man or woman when she’s down. It’s not uncommon for the baby to scream at the highest pitch possible while the 5-year-old starts jumping on the bed, singing a song about a monkey who broke its head.

If J-Fed thought it was difficult living with me, he surely had no idea how hard it would be to handle the two Lilliputians. I know it won’t be long before I show up at his apartment only to find him tied down with popsicle wrappers.

This is why many people with small children stay together until the children are older. Together we stand, divided we crumble into tiny little fragments of our former selves.