While record-searching/sorting, I stumbled upon this that I wrote to a client many moons ago, re. dating as a single parent esp. when your child is very young.

The constant search for “the next relationship” to the extent that parenting is put on the back burner is some messed up shit, but so is the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction where everything else gets put on the back burner and the child is the center of the universe. You don’t want to find yourself with an adolescent or young adult child one day who has an overdeveloped sense of entitlement to being at the center of everything you think and feel and do and who will punish you for daring to consider a relationship that is not centered on them one day.

Hmm… that’s pretty funny. I got to learn all the words to that song myself as a parent. Probably should have taken that advice I was dishing out…

Also this:

Martyrs don’t make good mothers. They just make money for therapists.

Hope that client spent the last 10 years balancing all that stuff a little better than I ultimately managed to 🤨 ‘Cause this stuff? Was a huge component of the misery/chaos crescendo that led up to my falling down and not managing to get back up for a few years, actually. I’ve been so focused on math and file folders I kinda forgot about getting kicked in the teeth by this crap.

I hardly ever meet anyone in my life who comes close to being my match in stubbornness. Some might call it bull-headedness. My grandmother certainly did! But my kid? Holy shit, y’all. She’d rather have been grounded *for an entire school year* than cave when she’d set her mind on not doing whatever it was I wanted her to do. Good times.

Parenting is not for the weak!

[reminder: i mostly update the Seraphin Station blog with new stuff. I mostly edit things that are already here on this blog rather than add new things so I can gradually make a coherent and less confusing whole out of the various blogs and sites I’ve got stuff posted/stored on. so if you want to read the latest, follow Seraphin Station, and consider signing up for the mailing list as well. I have all kinds of subscriber-only goodies going on with that.

And remember, if you’re a client/customer from 2015 whose stuff fell between the cracks and you want to know what I’m doing about it, there’s a whole FAQ devoted to that at Seraphin Station, too.]