I just met one of my besties, Cristie, for an impromptu quick cup of tea after morning drop-off. I broke my cardinal rule about going into public dressed in my sweats, and of course I ran into many people I knew, but at least I had curled my hair and put on lipstick, so it wasn’t a total disaster. This is not a cultural standard, but my own standard. This is New England—NO ONE wears lipstick, curls their hair, or wears colors, except for me. For me, no matter where I am, life just seems better when I have my lipstick on. Add a colorful dress, tutu, and sparkling boots and how can life be anything but bright and happy? But if you know me, you know the past couple of years have been everything BUT bright happy, in fact they’ve been chock full of tragedy that I’m still processing. Tutus and sparkle boots help for some reason! But I also needed some tools, so imagine my delight when I stumbled on an adorable tool kit one day in Home Goods. My heart sang when I saw it!
Anyway, Cristie told me about her crazy week because her husband is injured and can’t get out of bed. She has to do everything and her week sounds like my life: organize the kids, the house, drive the kids everywhere, who usually have to be across town at the exact same time—8am drop off for multiple kids at schools 20 miles apart; 4pm pickup for everyone… breakfast every morning, dinner every night, help with homework, laundry for multiple people, fix cellphones, handle the car, handle the leaky faucet, grocery shop, toilet paper, paper towels, care for five pets, water the greenhouse, this child needs new bras, this child has somehow run out of pants that fit him…. I have become a tech wizard. I fix computers and crashed internets, I program remote controls, and repair broken printers, I clean the house, walk the dogs, take care of the gardens, handle leaky faucets and frozen pipes and call the handyman if I can’t defrost frozen pipes myself. All this on top of caring for the children and teaching belly dance and writing and substitute teaching every day possible while I look for a job. At least I can do it in a tutu with the cutest tool kit packed in a black patent leather hat box!
Being a divorced single mom feels a lot like Burt in Mary Poppins, a one-man band, playing an instrument strapped to every part of his body. That’s me, trying to orchestrate our lives and make a symphony of beautiful music all on my own. And like Burt, I do it with cheery smile and a wink, because… well…. why be a grouch about it? There are magical moments where I dance with gusto across rooftops with my broom, my face and hands black with dirt and soot. There are moments where I grab the kid’s hands and we disappear into a painting and dance with penguins or ride carousel horses that take off and fly and we marvel at the beauty all around us. There are moments where we laugh so hard we float to the ceiling and can’t remember what it feels like to be on the ground. And there are moments where we stand on the ground with tears running down our faces as the magic flies away. But then we make our own magic by throwing our dream kites into the air and running to make them fly.
If there’s one thing we have learned these past few years, it’s that we make our own magic! No one else will make it for us. So single motherhood is like a combo of both Burt AND Mary Poppins
My brother, Carlos, came to visit me recently and after helping me drive kids all over, bringing in firewood and taking out the trash, he looked around my life and said, “I think one of the hardest parts of being a single mom, besides the obvious part of doing everything, would be the lack of emotional support. The buck stops with you. You don’t have anyone to take care of you when you don’t feel good, to put their arms around you at the end of a tough day and tell you everything is going to be all right, to talk to about the kids, sharing their triumphs and struggles. It’s just you.”
I nodded sadly. “True.”
Then he grabbed me in a headlock and gave me a noogie by rubbing my head with his knuckles. Even though I’m 50 and he’s 60, and we should be past this phase. But we’re not. And he’s my brother, and pre-programmed to mess with me.
And weirdly, just having my brother put into words one of the hardest parts of being a single mom, helped in some way. I hadn’t thought of it before, I was just running from thing to thing, grabbing and holding and balancing everything so nothing crashes to the ground and gets broken.
And I’m lucky that I have my brother, my friends, my sisters, and so much support around me. They are part of my adorable tool kit–people who love me, cheer for me, and always listen.
But I also have a secret weapon in my tool kit–my handyman named Don. He is a superhero in disguise as a salty New Englander who doesn’t say the letter R in any word. He knows my house inside and out because he worked on it long before I moved in. He is the type of handyman who takes photos of my broken pipes and sends them to me of why they were broken, even if I’d rather not know. Lord knows I don’t need to see photos of my broken sewage pipes. But these days, I have learned that it’s good to know.
Don’t turn away, Marci! Knowledge is power, and not knowing doesn’t change the truth. If your pipes are broken and covered in crap, don’t look away! Fix them! So I look at the photos, say, “Yuck,” and know that the pipes in the house are not a big unknown mystery. They are laid out in an organized way that makes everything run efficiently. My handyman knows how they work, and now I know how they work.
In addition to being able to fix anything and everything from stone fences to squirrel nests to ice dams to water heaters, Don collects old maps and scans the locations of ancient porches and sledding hills with his metal detector, anywhere where things fall out of pockets, finding pre-revolutionary war belt buckles, rare coins, and all sorts of cool things. I love seeing his treasures. He brings them over in bags with papers telling about their history and I call the kids to come see the Indian head pennies and satchel buckles from the 1700’s.
Cristie likes to tell the story of the first time she met my handyman. It was many years ago on Valentine’s Day, so of course I was wearing a red tutu and antennas with furry blinking hearts on them. Don was talking to me in his salty non-nonsense way while I nodded my head in my sweet very-full-of-nonsense way. Cristie is the queen of amusing observations, and there’s no one more gifted in recounting hilarious anecdotes.
So I have to go pick up my manuscripts, teach Harry Potter class, make cookies for to sell at the school play this weekend, pick up my son, make dinner, pick up my daughter… the usual Thursday evening.
And you can bet I’ll be doing it in my sparkle boots. Because as they say, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” (And I’m wondering how Dick VanDyke movies keep entering my subconscious lol)
