Mom Reveals Unexpected Joys Of Solo Parenting — 'My Unpaid Labor Was Taken For Granted'
When you're already used to carrying the emotional and mental load, solo parenting can feel liberating.
PeopleImages, reginafosterphotos | Canva The day before I asked my husband for some time apart, we had an argument about the dishes. Is there anything more cliché?
It might have been the first argument we’ve ever had about the dishes. My husband has never liked doing dishes. He says it irritates his hands. He cleans the rest of the kitchen — historically, to sparkling standards, though those standards have noticeably decreased as of late — and leaves the dishes for me.
Of all the things I’ve minded over the course of our 16-year marriage, doing the dishes has not been one of them. It’s a chore I find satisfying, and I’ve never found it to irritate my hands. But I did mind when he told me to leave the dishes for him to do in the morning.
This happened because he disappeared downstairs after dinner, then ended up scrambling to clean and felt bad that it had gotten so late. I minded when he told me that he’d do the dishes in the morning because we both knew he had no intention whatsoever of doing the dishes in the morning.
This left me with three choices:
- Give him a chance to follow through, then when he inevitably didn’t, do the dishes myself and risk him lashing out at me because I should have left them for him.
- Give him a chance to follow through, then when he inevitably didn’t, ask him to do the dishes and risk him rolling his eyes at me and muttering something under his breath about everyone having to do things on my timeline.
- Give him a chance to follow through, then when he inevitably didn’t, face the unappetizing prospect of attempting to prepare dinner in our tiny kitchen next to a sink overflowing with dishes, with cooking utensils I needed buried in there somewhere, all of which I would be left to wash after dinner anyway.
Of course, my frustration wasn’t really about the dishes.
It was about being backed into corners time and time again, caught between delegating tasks or doing them myself, being the martyr or being the nag.
It was about the emotional energy it takes to confront this endless parade of no-win propositions, to attempt to predict how my husband will react to each of my potential courses of action, to either choose the route that will lead to less immediate conflict because I’m tired, or choose to advocate for myself and suffer the consequences. To either martyr myself in front of my children — an example no feminist mother wants to set — or to mire myself in a conflict that may turn ugly.
I ended up leaving the dishes in the sink all day. Then I washed them as I prepared dinner so I could make room for the new dishes. I hadn’t planned on saying anything. As usual, I was tired.
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But later that evening, we found ourselves mired in conflict anyway. I don’t even remember what it was about. I brought up the dishes, because conflicts have a way of bringing simmering resentments to the surface, and that was the moment when I realized I couldn’t do this anymore. I had become a wife who argued with her husband about the dishes. I had become a cliché.
The infamous dishes argument took place back in April. For the next two months, my husband and I rotated between our home and an apartment he’d already been renting closer to his work.
We both knew we wouldn’t have access to the apartment during the summer. What I didn’t know was that, without consulting me, he’d found himself another place to live. And for reasons that still have yet to be explained, neither I nor the kids could stay there.
If your reaction to this is, “What the?” then you’re in good company, because that was my reaction, too. Whether it’s to the bedroom downstairs or to a secretly rented apartment, my husband feels entitled to disappear sometimes.
His unilateral decision essentially meant that he would barely be seeing his children for over two months and that I would be solo parenting full-time for the summer.
My unpaid labor was assumed and entirely taken for granted, but that was nothing new.
At the center of my white-hot fury, embers of empathy still smoldered. I knew my husband was acting out of fear, a fear that stemmed from traumas he had yet to fully process.
But honestly, I wasn’t interested in getting caught up in my fury or my empathy. The point of our time apart had been to find some respite. I’d spent the better part of two decades managing my husband’s emotions and my own not-always-productive reactions.
I wanted to feel my own feelings again.
Truth be told, the first feeling I felt was dread. The cold weight of dread, blurred by a fog of swirling anxiety. I still had to put in 36 hours a week at my “real job.” It was the first summer I hadn’t signed my kids up for any camps. What in the world would they do all day? How would I be able to focus? How would we all manage?
Ten long weeks. Whenever I closed my eyes I saw them stretched out before me like a hot desert road, with the fall a mere pinprick on the horizon line. Back in 2018, my husband did a three-month fieldwork assignment in a city 11 hours by car from our home. Our kids were five and newly three back then, and I was working 40 hours a week in a downtown office.
When a coworker asked me how things were going that summer, I told him, “They’re easier and harder.” Easier because with my husband gone, there were three fewer relationships in the household that could potentially devolve into conflict. And as an introvert who frequently felt flooded by the chaos of our home, I relished my solo time after the kids went to bed.
But harder because I was also very much “in the thick of things,” as they say — that intensive period of parenting in which I was still bathing my children, combing their hair, helping them get dressed in the morning, preparing all the meals, cleaning all the things, and undergoing extensive, individualized bedtime routines.
I mostly muddled through those months. I remember giving myself more than one timeout on the stairs leading down to the basement. When I dropped into bed at night, exhaustion burrowed deep in my bones.
At the dawn of this summer, I remembered how exhausted I felt while solo parenting seven years ago, and I envisioned evenings spent in self-imposed timeouts on the stairs to our basement. But to my surprise, I’ve found myself feeling both energized and liberated. Turns out, when your kids can dress themselves, bathe themselves, feed themselves, and sort of clean up after themselves… well, solo parenting can be an enormous relief.
Let’s face it — co-parenting is hard on all of us.
I find it amusing that in the paid economy, we are highly intentional about writing detailed job descriptions and creating all kinds of matrixes and charts — organizational charts and accountability charts, decision-zone and responsibility assignment matrixes. We seem to intuitively understand that without a clear delineation of roles and responsibilities, mass chaos could potentially ensue.
But when it comes to parenting, we simply throw two people together and wish them luck. Maybe they’re soulmates, or maybe they had a good dating run around the time everyone else was getting married. Either way, that we simply expect partners to “figure it out” — on our own time, of which we have precious little because our paid jobs demand most of our attention and energy — speaks to how little our society values the work of parenting and household management.
I’d always thought that my husband and I had a strong foundation of shared values, but over the years, the foundation began to reveal its cracks. Over the past 10+ years, we have had to navigate hundreds of decisions we weren’t always prepared to navigate, and we frequently found ourselves on different pages.
Most married couples, us included, did not have discussions about parenting styles before entering legally binding contracts, and besides, we had no way of really knowing what kinds of parents we would be until we actually became parents. I swore up and down that I would be the kind of parent who relished messy art and would be totally unfazed if my kids tracked sand into the house. Oh, how wrong I was…
Besides, parenting styles are not immutable — so much depends on the child’s personality and the ways in which this personality evolves as a child grows older.
All that is not even to mention that parenting itself just keeps getting more and more complicated. There’s the growing lack of social support, yes, and then there’s the ongoing task of protecting your children from an ever-growing body of potentially addictive substances and habits that The Outside World aggressively flings their way, starting with sugar and ultra-processed foods, then progressing to video games, social media, porn, energy drinks, alcohol, and opioids — to name just a few.
Most parents can agree this stuff is potentially dangerous for our kids, but we are raising them in a society that doesn’t really care because it profits off our addictions (the younger we hook ’em, the better), and it’s becoming an increasingly tall order for anyone to agree on a reasonable and effective approach to mitigate the damage, let alone two tired, stressed out people who have plenty of other things to figure out, like who’s taking Zoey to basketball practice, who’s sending out invitations for Mason’s birthday — or, yes, who’s doing the dishes.
Even for parents who are lucky enough to be able to consistently align their parenting styles and divide up the physical chores, there are still gender inequities to contend with.
Unless both mother and father bring an enormous amount of intention to a heterosexual co-parenting partnership, mothers will become the primary caregivers and default parents, all the while contending with the consistent minimization of our extra unpaid mental and emotional labor.
Many of us mothers quietly (sometimes even subconsciously) protect our co-parent’s sleep, time, boundaries, and feelings in ways that are rarely reciprocated, unless we go out of our way to ask. We are always asking for what we need, or weighing the consequences of asking for what we need.
We either make or delegate decisions, do or delegate tasks. We are not-so-lovingly referred to as the Nag in Chief or the Ruiner of Fun for enforcing limits on video games, or haranguing kids to do chores, or rushing people in and out the door so everyone can get where they need to be, which is usually two to four different places at any given time.
As default parents, we are already doing much of the work demanded of a solo parent. We are also, in some ways, parenting our partners, too.
Some religious folks have told me that by asking for time apart from my husband, I am “blowing up” my family. That I need to think of my children. That this isn’t just about me. They are right, on one count. This isn’t just about me. Because I’ve discovered that I am far better at solo parenting than I am at co-parenting with my husband. And I’m not sure what the latest science says, but I’m pretty sure that being a better parent is good for my children.
I’m not engaging in behavior I don’t entirely feel comfortable with for the sake of avoiding conflict. I’m not worried about enabling my husband’s problematic behavior to their detriment. When I make decisions, I’m not ignoring my gut or my own wants and needs because of what my husband will think. I don’t have to balance the attention I pay to my kids with the attention I pay to my husband.
Without all the mental gymnastics of delegation, without all the energy invested in how my husband will react if…, without the endless emotional roller coasters, I am a more present mother.
A less anxious mother. A more confident mother. Heck, I’m even more fun.
I used to consider myself a fun person. In college, my nickname was “Fun Kerala.” Somewhere along the way, I became the Ruiner of Fun. Because that’s what marriage and motherhood under the patriarchy tend to do to women. It ruins our fun and then blames us for ruining everyone else’s.
In my quest to reclaim my sense of self, I am also challenging myself to use my extra energy to reach outward and to build community beyond my home.
Parental text threads used to overwhelm me, but now I actively initiate them (even if they still stress me out). I’ve been more intentional about nurturing a network of neighborhood parents who can send their kids scampering over to our house or graciously accept my children when they scamper over to theirs.
During a guided psilocybin journey I embarked on this past May, I was initially somewhat surprised that my immediate family didn’t play a more central role. After all, I was in the midst of a marital separation and they were very much on my mind. Instead, I found myself being held by an intricate web, into which was woven the light and love of my ancestors and everyone else I had ever cared for, or who had ever cared for me. In retrospect, I think I get it. My journey was very much about love, but not romantic love. Not love from one person in particular.
As a society, we place far too much stock in romance, holding romantic partners responsible for all the roles and tasks that once required a village.
I know I can’t build a village all by myself, and in practice, my community feels loosely knit, always fraying at the edges. But I’ve found that when I reach out, people often reach back. As I write this, my daughter is in the kitchen with her friend, making cinnamon toast. My son is in the front yard with two of his friends, climbing our tree. I’m hiding downstairs, fully expecting to be interrupted at any moment.
Most of the summer has been like this — me, hiding in the basement and trying to work or write, while children from all corners of the neighborhood drift in and out of our home. When I emerge in the afternoon, I sit on the porch and field various demands and requests, sometimes doling out money so the kids can walk to get ice cream. Every now and then, a friend, parent, and/or neighbor joins me on the porch.
It feels kind of 1950s, minus the husband in the suit and tie who comes home at the end of the day, expecting to be attended to and served.
There is a lot left to be worked out; my future is frighteningly uncertain. My Husband Problem still lingers like a storm cloud on the periphery of my vision, and I know the journey ahead of me will be turbulent, at best. I hope my husband can eventually find a way back into his children’s lives, in whatever form that takes.
But for now, I’ll take each day as it comes. I’ll treasure the warm summer mornings, the roll of sweat droplets down the small of my back, and the slant of the evening sun through lush, leafy trees. I’ll administer bandaids and kiss foreheads and, as children scurry in and out of the house, I’ll shout, “Close the front door!” at least a dozen times a day. In the evening, I’ll do The Griddy while I cook and my son will tell me I’m doing it wrong. My daughter will make guacamole or assemble a salad, and I’ll misuse Gen Z slang to try to make her smile.
See? I told you I was fun. Meanwhile, the sink full of dishes will barely register. It no longer presents a complex and symbolic emotional battle. It’s merely another chore, and it’s one I never really minded doing in the first place.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.