Wednesday, May 8, 2013

A Day in the Life of a Single Mom

Are you exhausted? What is your typical day like?  How do you rate your day? Did you have a stressful day in the office and combated traffic to get home? Are you lucky than most single moms because you can work from home? How do you describe a day in the life of a single mom?

A single mom gets up early in the morning; that is, if she ever had any sleep at all.  A single mom doesn’t have help in nursing her baby whose eating and sleeping hours are far from normal.  In my case, I have two kids.  I nurse a baby and need to prepare my eldest for school. I prepare her breakfast, bathe her, get her dressed and ready for school.
When she’s been picked-up by her school bus, I need to hurry with housework – clean the house, take out the garbage and finish the laundry.  While doing all these stuff, I am praying and hoping that my baby will not wake up and allow me to finish these duties.  If I am lucky, he wakes up when I am done and I then feed him and clean him up.  Time flies and I’ve forgotten to eat my breakfast.

No problem, lunch is soon approaching.  I quickly prepared a sandwich for lunch and grabbed quick bites in between checking and answering my emails. Today I am lucky because my son slept longer than usual and I was able to do some work online to keep cash coming for the next week.  How I wish I could work longer to pay off my debts and leave enough money for our basic needs of food, shelter and my kid’s school.  Anyway, today is still a good day as I was able to work undisturbed for four hours.
By three in the afternoon, I heard the sweet yell of my little girl who is back from school, "Mom, I'm home, I'm hungry".  I prepared a quick snack, talked to her about school and helped her with her home work.  She is such a darling as she looked after his baby brother as I prepared our dinner.
After dinner, I bathe my kids and tucked them to bed.  Once sound asleep, I washed the dishes and took a quick shower.  By now it is almost ten in the evening.  Sleepy and exhausted, I forced myself to keep my focus as I need to catch up with my online work to keep cash coming in.

I think I've been working for two hours when my baby cried for milk.  So I had to take a break from work to attend to the hungry pangs of my baby.  This day, I am unusually lucky because my baby slept again after gulping a bottle of milk.  There were nights when he is active and I had to play with him before he decides to go back to sleep.  There were also nights when he just keeps on crying without reason (probably, he is feeling my tensions?). 
Tonight he woke up only once and I was able to keep my mind working for another four hours.  I had to make use of this opportunity because I don’t get lucky every day. It’s now four in the morning.  I think it’s time to energize. I hope I could just shut off my mind and sleep to give my body its much needed rest.  I need to be up by six in the morning for another challenging day.  I hope my day tomorrow will be as lucky as it was today.

Honestly, there is not a day that I am not exhausted.  Sometimes apart from physical exhaustion, I feel sad and lonely. But overall, I love my life.  I love my day because I love my kids.
How about you, what is your typical day?

No comments:

Post a Comment