Two summers ago, when I was trying to install the bedroom air conditioner myself and nearly plummeted to a gory death on the sidewalk below, I missed my ex. I missed him enough to yell some REALLY CHOICE EPITHETS to the neighborhood as I crawled backward on the front porch roof, scraping my tummy on the asphalt shingles, back into the relative safety of my bedroom. Charmingly original things like: “#$!@ YOU, [INSERT NAME OF EX-HUSBAND] [REPEAT AS NECESSARY]!”

Because the air conditioners? THAT is the kind of thing HE would have taken care of. And when THOSE THINGS go wrong, and I barely escape death, I GET A LITTLE CRANKY.

Yo. Don’t get me wrong. I am a rockin’ cool feminist-humanist-manist-whoeverist. I took Women’s Studies 101, 201 and 346. I left college firmly believing that gender roles were society-defined and archaic. I headed off in Birkenstocks into my grownup life smugly certain that women and men and any other gender who wanted to be a separate gender were all equal to ANY task the world could offer up.

I still believe that, in theory. But sadly, My Individual Self has been a disappointment when it comes to meeting society’s traditionally male challenges. Like, SERIOUSLY PITIFUL. Like, TRY NOT TO LOOK AT THE HOT MESS SNIVELING ON THE FLOOR WITH THE VERIZON INTERNET GUY, “TROUBLESHOOTING.”
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I made it to ten years and ten months. Ten years and ten months without ever getting my older daughter so angry with me that she refused to speak to me.

I like to think it was a pretty good run, overall. God knows there will be plenty more silent treatments to come, anyway. The teen years are rapidly approaching.

Still.

I felt awful that I’d let her down. Still do. Neither her father nor I could make it to her school talent show this year. In our defense, it was on a Wednesday morning, at 11, and plenty of other parents couldn’t make it either.

It feels worse, somehow, to be the single parent who screws up.
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It is difficult to explain to my daughters what I do. I don’t have an office to go to. I am a writer, and as far as they understand it, EVERYONE can write, so everyone must be a writer.

I find sometimes I forget what it means, myself, to call myself a writer. Freelance work is spotty these days. Much of what I do is working on creative pieces that don’t pay—yet, if ever. What the hell do you think you’re doing? the grumpy inner voice demands. Who the hell do you think you are?

I decided I needed a kickstart, a refresher course to remind me what it is, in this bleak and muddy season, to call myself a writer—to BE a writer. I learned about a Winter Writers Retreat, all women, in a cabin in the woods in SE Ohio. Did I dare?
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I have to laugh that I’ve been writing a blog called Single Mom at Work during the most rocky economic times this country has seen in decades (and rocky for this little family as well). I lost my full-time job as senior creative copywriter at a fancy-pants wholesale home decor company about four years back, when the company downsized. That went down just as the marriage was going down. The double whammy packed a punch like you wouldn’t believe (or perhaps you would).

Since then, the girls and I have gotten by with my little writing gigs here and there, unemployment insurance, government assistance and family help. The girls don’t remember my old office at the home decor company. They know my “office” as the corner of the dining-room table, or atop my bed, upstairs, during the cold months, when the downstairs is too chilly.

A while back, I put together my teaching CV. A friend works at a distance-learning university, and they were interested. So I’ve been learning something called Blackboard, a program tailored to online teachers and learners. I figured this would be an easy enough task to conquer.

Oh, poor brain.
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