““Love” is a that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own…”
Robert Heinlein
Sometimes you’ve got to be selfish to be selfless.
When we become parents, we have a huge urge to make it work to make it work as a family, to make it work as a couple, to make it work as a mum or a dad. What society fails to tell us is that it’s important to make it work for ourselves.
I left the father of my children two years ago.
I moved out of the family home two months ago.
We stayed together, we said, for the sake of the kids. I think what we failed to realise was that the way to our children’s happiness was through our own. And we were anything but happy. The fact is that we split two years ago, but probably should’ve have split way before then. We weren’t constantly fighting or screaming at each other, but we both knew a long time before that day that it was over.
We fail to see that sometimes things are not meant to be. It took a personal development course for me to realise that I was unhappy. I think I was just going through the motions and couldn’t see a way that I could raise my children by myself. I also didn’t want to raise them by myself, and their dad didn’t want to raise them by himself either. Calling yourself a single parent has connotations. It felt negative. It felt like failure.
The night the relationship officially ended, it resulted in a sense of relief, I think for both of us I believe. I think we both knew, as I said before, that it was over way before it was over. We’d been in separate bedrooms for months before that and the relationship up to that point was full of resentment and defence. The love and support was there in the distance, but mainly as two parents trying to raise happy children rather than two people madly in love.
At the time of the breakup, we decided to stay together until the children finished school. I’m not sure what he said to his friends or whether he even explained it, but when I told my closest friends, they thought I was mad. It was definitely not the norm. I think to be honest that we were kidding ourselves and it only made sense financially to stay in the same home.
For the first year we managed, we made it work. We argued less, but I’m not sure that we were really doing things together. We were almost like ships in the night passing each other on the stairs and sharing small bits of information about what the children had done at school or what trouble they had got up to.
I certainly took on the brunt of the childcare throughout the majority of our relationship and the bulk of the house management. I booked the school lunches and paid attention to the WhatsApp group to know whether a cardboard box or fancy dress outfit was required for the next day. I also spent over 40 hours a week in London and two hours each day commuting to get to the office while he mainly worked from home. I got to the point where I realised there was no benefit of being in the same house together, not even for the sake of the children. Not for me anyway. So, a year after the split, I decided to speak to him about separate parenting.
This decision came from two areas. The first was to get the children used to being with just one of us at a time. The second was to give me a little bit more freedom in an attempt to build a life for myself outside the family home. We split the childcare during the week 50/50, and for most of that time, I created plans when I wasn’t at home. I spent time with friends and socialised. I even started dating. I started to remember who I was before I became a mum.
The children had the comfort of being in the house they grew up in and living with both parents, despite the fact that the parents weren’t really in the same room at the same time. It warmed them to idea of us being apart. They didn’t exactly enjoy it. They were vocal about that but we both knew for the right reasons.
Eventually, their Dad started dating and met someone he liked. I’d been dating before this, but I’ve been quite conscious that I didn’t want to jump from one relationship straight into another, and although I enjoyed meeting a few people I knew I didn’t want anything serious as I was too busy focusing on myself.
When their Dad asked me about the kids meeting his new partner, I knew that living together was just unsustainable. I spent more time avoiding being home on the days when I didn’t have the children and as much as I enjoyed spending more time with friends, as I’d pretty much given most of that up while raising kids, I didn’t feel comfortable in my own home anymore. I made the decision to move out.
As we were living in Kent and my job was in London, the commute to work was nearly 2 hours door-to-door. I realised if the children were only with me, and he wasn’t around, I would need to get home to them quickly, especially in case of an emergency, and I couldn’t move work, so I decided to move back to London.
Any parents out there will realise that moving children out of a school in the middle of a term was not exactly simple so I had to leave and I had to leave without my children. We decided the only way to make this work was for them to stay with their dad in the week until I sorted out their new school.
It was possibly one of the hardest decisions I’d ever had to make. Being a mother who had a career before she had children, meant that that career was very important, it also became more important once they were born, because everything that I did, every pay rise that I got, every promotion that led me to more senior positions, was all so that I could give myself financial security in order to raise them as best I could.
Before that personal development course, I hadn’t spent more than one night away from my children since they were born. I can count on both hands how many babysitters they had over the years. This is the thing about being a working mother – guilt! When they were really young, all I could think about was getting home to them. When friends asked me out on weekends, I said no because I wanted to spend time with the children. So leaving them in Kent while I moved to London was definite;y not a decision I made lightly. It took two years of convincing myself that life would get better to go through with it.
So on the 19th of January 2024 I did my last ever school run to their current school. I dropped my children off, and told them I loved them. We cried and cuddled and that afternoon I moved out of the family home.
Now don’t get me wrong, I saw them the very next day. The only way I could get through it was knowing I would get to see them every weekend. It gave their dad the opportunity to have a little bit of time back and of course it gave me time with my babies.
My son, who is now eight, held it together, but he struggled, and it came out through his behaviour at school. My daughter on the other hand, who has only just turned six, cried every Sunday night when I had to drop her off, clinging to me, crying, as I had to pass her over to her Dad. It was tough. Heartbreaking even.
Being an adult meant I knew the reasons why I did it and I had to keep looking at the horizon and reminding myself that it was all for the best. I was able to hold it together, continue to go to work, continue to leave my team, continue to do my job, continue to do up the new house and decorate my children’s bedrooms and enjoy time living with my sister. However, I have to admit, in the back of my mind, I felt heartbroken. Empty. I craved their presence.
I think I managed to get through an entire month and a half before I let it show what it was doing to me. It was on a Wednesday and the Tuesday night before, I had rang my children and read their bedtime story as I did regularly. On this occasion, my daughter just cried none stop saying that she couldn’t wait three more days to see me. Knowing that she had school the next day, and I had work, there was nothing I could do but sit there and try and reassure her that it was just three more sleeps to go.
It stayed in my head all night and continued to do so into work the next day. As team leaders, we have to be open and allow the things that are hard in our personal lives to come through. Hiding it only makes it worse in the end. So I didn’t sugarcoat it to my team and I told them I had to leave and go work from home for fear of bursting into tears at any moment.
However, that following Monday I had a call from a school 10 minutes down the road from the new house. They had two spaces for the kids and they could start as soon as possible. This darkness in the pit of my stomach that had been clouding so much of my head just vanished. My babies were coming home. We agreed on a date for three weeks to give them a little bit of time to say goodbye to their school friends, prepare them for the move, and give their dad a little bit more time with them before they came to live with me.
So there we have it. I can say goodbye to the weeknight social events and quiet mornings before work. I can say hello again to school runs and homework and bedtimes. It’s going to be hard, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.
The new house is clean. The house is tidy. The house is quiet. But it’s felt so empty without them. Bring on the chaos, bring on the happiness. Bring on the love. Bring on the laughter. Bring on life as an emotionally and no doubt physically exhausted, professional single mum. I’m ready and in time, I hope the minis know why I had to do it.
Insanely Normal 