How to survive co-parenting with style

Crossing the road for burger and beer, I’m wearing fresh red lipstick. My hair is done, I have perfume on. I am out. It is night. I am free, I am an adult, having wonderful adult time.

My friend James is having wonderful adult time too. “I haven’t seen the kids for seven weeks.” He applies himself to his beer.

I just saw Little One a few hours ago, and I’ll see her again in three days. I’m ashamed of myself for shedding tears in the car on my way to dinner. For yelling “F#* you!” as I drive away from the house. Because I don’t hate my ex at all. He’s a wonderful dad, and a lovely person. In fact, part of me wishes I was still back at the house, cuddling on the couch, watching The Voice.

The alternative title of this story is “how not to be miserable when you drop your child off with your ex for for the four day stint”. To make it clear, this was my choice, 100% my choice. Well, the 50/50 co-parenting arrangement part of it was. Little One needs and loves her dad equally as much as she loves and needs her mum. Just because I’m in that kind of mood, anyone who says otherwise, or uses kids as pawns in a relationship battle, can get F#*ed too.

Anyhow, what do you do?

1. When you’ve got beyond the first part where you sit in the car, screaming ‘I hate you, you bastard/bitch (insert as appropriate).
2. You drive away, back to the empty house. You drive away from the warmth and light; the lovingly prepared dinner. The smoochy cat. The new lego collection, the clean, good-smelling house, in the better area.
3. You smile. Your red-lipsticked, sexy-sexy smile, the ‘I’m going straight out on a date. A hot, hot date. No, I don’t want to watch television with you in my slippers. Slippers aren’t even comfortable. And since you asked, I wear these black high heels as my regular shoes, even naked. These days.’
4. As a response to the unholy mess of pegs, candles, science experiments, blocks, lego, playdough, second-hand dolls with ratty hair, crayons, sparkly stickers, old necklaces, ripped dress-ups tangled with old curtains that did duty as Rapunzel hair, ribbons, tissues, half-eaten peanut butter sandwiches and the half-painted plaster-of-paris Llama, do not open a cheap bottle of bubbly and lie down with it in the middle of the floor. Instead, turn on a Soweto Gospel Choir playlist very loud, and clean. I don’t mean that it’s clean music, although it is, all through. Clean, deep clean, like a clean glass window, a clear, clear light sound. Piercing any, a ray of light into the cathedral which is somewhat darkened.
5. What I mean is, do the cleaning up. Be brutal. Put your mouth into a grim line of suffering if you have to. You’re allowed to feel like drinking, but you have to move your legs, butt and arms to get all the signs of chaos, playdough, small trousers, tiny knickers, tantrums, coloured paper, little kisses, cuddles and giggles tidied away. Immediately. Don’t dwell. If you work to the sound of the Soweto Gospel Choir you can turn it into an adult space in 15 minutes.
6. During that time, the cat will come back. The drums beat out sadness. The harmony lifts the roof. Gentle piano has space to move through the newly created space.
7. Admit it, there is pleasure, great pleasure in silence. In aloneness. In being able to run the bath, get into the bath, soak there with your ears under the water and not have to be responsible for any other being. You just have to take the jot of joy, the dot of joy, and use it as an anchor to build around like on the wall. You put the first tile on and you have to press for ages, but then you can work outwards. The first one is the hardest but it bolsters the others, and before you know it, hah, that’s a lie, but after several hours hard graft, you realise that although your back is aching, when you step back, there’s a bit of colour. Start small.
8. Write through it. Soweto Gospel Choir or something else suitably uplifting as background music because you need to be lifted very strongly. By something outside yourself, because all will to move, all life feels, it feels like you strap your life into the car seat to drive it away. It feels like you tell it brightly and cheerily “Gosh, daddy will be looking forward to seeing you!” and then
9. You suck it up 100% as you do this. So she can run happily up to daddy’s house, so she can casually call out goodbye, busy playing already, too busy for a kiss, and you call out ‘see ya, honey!’. Casual out the door, life moving slower and yet slower. I feel life moving slowly, I make my feet move.
10. This joy that I have, the devil can’t take it from me. Oh when the saints, go marching in, dear lord! This joy that I’m feeling, the devil can’t take it away. Oh how I want to be in that number! When the saints go marching in, special lord.
11. And when it sounds like they’re singing your child’s name, harmonising, riffing on it, fantasia of your child’s name, hallelujah! Just skip onto the next song.
12. Pretend you are your own child. Be firm, but kind.
13. You’re allowed to download a novel, a very, very distracting novel. It should not be literature. It should be plot-driven, yet characterful. It should have emotional warmth, but feature a central character who is deeply flawed. Who is less capable of sustaining a long term relationship than you are yourself. It should be by your new favourite crime novelist, and it doesn’t even matter if its expensive. Everything is relative. Think of what you save by not smoking.
14. Your child’s other parent is their present, but your past. Your brain keeps on trying to make meaning out of the incomprehensible sussurating words of the Soweto gospel, but you can’t make any true meanings out of it. You thought you used to be able to speak that language, but that was just desire.
15. Appreciate the beautiful men’s voices. Beautiful men. Mmm. The rich, deep tones of their voices. Men; as a complete block of rich sound, a depth of strength, a power of harmony. Who can know any other person?
16. Cook. Get up and cook. Then actually eat. Ok, because the rice is cooking in his old rice-cooker, the rice cooker that he wanted to throw out because one of its plastic feet got burnt down on the element, but you argued against it because it was still a perfectly good rice cooker, and you could prop it up to the perfect height again by putting an upside down spoon under the leg, but now that rice cooker is yours, but he has probably bought a new rice cooker, which he always wanted to do anyway. Because of that, you can have a glass of wine. Just one. and make it nice quality, so you’re drinking it for the flavour, not for the gentle confusion, the smoothing-out qualities.
17. of the ragged edges of paragraphs. Rich, rich soothing that shoots up to the brain almost immediately, the warmth. Tastes of forgetfulness.
18. Animal biscuits smell like Little One. Shampoo, top-of-head, morning-child-breath, damp wool, sand, clean clothes, even the pasta drawer, which is ridiculous when you consider that at 7.59 the previous night, as you gently, gently, gently micro-manouvered your hand out of the semi-sleeping clutch of determined little fingers, you were swearing in your mind. It was the second hour of assisted sleep. Your arm was going dead, and you thought longingly, you actually thought longingly, of this time when you would be alone.
19. Remember, you thirsted for this aloneness as you hoisted the small bottom onto your other knee so you could reach for the toilet-paper. You asked yourself if you could have a moment, just a moment, to read your book silently, to write quietly. Any you answered yourself bitterly, ‘no’. no I can’t. Bitterly, you answered yourself, remember?
20. It’s hard to remember! You visualised the umbilical cord, stretching across the 10 centimetre space between the two beds. Tomorrow, you tell yourself, the space will be 11 centimetres.
21. You just watch, maybe forever, listening to the snotty breathing, the snores and little snorts, and being there to gently, gently cover her up after she throws the blankets around and rotates her body 360 degrees. To pick her up gently as she shifts in the middle of deep, deep sleep, rearrange her limbs so, so gently and murmur, ‘head on pillow, darling, head on pillow’ so softly that it floats into her dream.