Meeting My People

Twenty-one posts in, you know more about me than the majority of the people I see in person every week, but you have never met my single mom family. You know what time I wake up, what my budget looks like when it’s stretched too thin, and what happened the day I moved from having a job to not having one. What you haven’t had is the context underneath it all, the actual people whose mornings I’m timing, whose school shoes I’m budgeting for, and whose homework gets debated over at the kitchen table during supper. So here they are, my people.

Meet the Crew – My Single Mom Family

My eldest is twenty now, which is a strange thing to type when I still remember carrying her on my hip while I made dinner one-handed. I had her at twenty myself, and while our lives are on very different paths at the same age, I know that the moment she arrived, being her mother became the most important thing in my life, and it still is. She’s been with me through the most of it. The hard phases, the rebuilding, and the versions of me that weren’t always my best. It is true what they say, that children experience their parents at different stages of their lives depending on when they’re born, and she got some of the harder stages. My only hope now is that she can see the woman I am today and understand that everything I’ve done, every hard choice and every sacrifice, was always with her and her siblings at the centre of it and that it means something to her.

Independence is the one thing I have tried hardest to instil in all my kids, and she has it in spades, sometimes more than I would like when it comes to taking advice from her mother. But that’s twenty for you. Young adults at that age don’t take direction well, and I’ve learned the best thing I can do is stop trying to hand it to her and start trusting that life will teach her what I can’t. She’s in a bit of a grey area right now, working things out the way I was at exactly her age, and all I can do is encourage, motivate, and guide her when she asks. What she does with any of that is entirely up to her. She’s a beautiful soul, and I know she’ll find her way.

My son is fifteen, and he is my pillar, quietly, in the way reserved people often are. He’d rather be behind a screen making friends through gaming than out chasing a crowd, and somewhere in between the levelling up and the online friendships, he’s already got a business mind ticking away, always working out some new way to make a rand. He’s got a hard exterior that shows up when he’s upset, and he won’t admit to being a softie even though he absolutely is one. I know it because when he’s at his dad’s, he’ll send me a random message just to say he misses me, and at fifteen, he still climbs into my bed some nights and curls up next to me as he did at five.

He disagrees with me outright when he thinks I’ve got something wrong, and I’ve made my peace with that, because a child who can stand his ground with the right respect attached to it is a child who feels safe enough to have feelings in the first place and doesn’t feel the need to hide them from me. There’s something in boys and their mothers, an instinct that runs both ways, and I feel it every time he quietly plants himself between me and whatever’s bothering me and makes it known he’s got this. He’s the man of the house in every way that counts, and he doesn’t even know it yet. That’s the part of him nobody else gets to see.

My youngest is thirteen, and she is several things at once. Talkative to the point that I can’t keep up some days, a consummate socialite who lives for her buddies and group chats, the polar opposite of who I was at her age. She has an authoritative presence that makes you want to avoid getting on her bad side, and she is one of the most loving, cheerful children I know. She’s girly in the sense that spending an hour in front of the mirror, hair and accessories included, is unavoidable, but her real style is edgy and completely her own, and she doesn’t care what anyone thinks of it. I love that about her most of all.

Then there’s my mother, who I currently live with. She cooks for us most days, which is the only thing that keeps dinner from becoming a disaster during the tough weeks, and she’s the one the kids turn to when their Afrikaans homework exceeds my ability to assist them. It’s practical, and right now, practicality is what’s keeping this household going. But I am aware that she has already raised her children, and the fact that she is still willing to devote her time means more than she probably realises. I try not to expect too much. More than anything, I want her to enjoy her life now; she deserves it.

The Siblings

What’s funny is watching the three of them together, because they’re proof that the same two parents can produce three completely different operating systems. My son and youngest have more of a love-hate thing going, teasing each other mercilessly, the kind of moaning and shouting that somehow ends in a giggle five minutes later, so I’ve stopped worrying every time it kicks off. They don’t really hang out or show much affection toward each other, not yet, but every now and then I catch a flicker of something shifting, slow, but there. I’ve seen my son stand up for his sister at least once, even though he’d never admit it happened.

My eldest and my son, though, are properly close, closer than she probably realises. They share a love of gaming and end up playing online together more than either of them would say out loud, and there’s a warmth between the two of them that doesn’t need explaining. She’s kinder to both of them than they are to each other, though she tolerates her brother a fair bit more than her sister, and she’s become something of an example to them without meaning to, her actions carrying more weight with the two of them than she knows. She won’t mother them; that’s not her role, and she knows it, but she’ll tell them straight if they’re out of line or not listening to me. I used to think siblings either got along or they didn’t. Mine taught me it’s neither. It’s a running negotiation that resets every single day.

So There You Have It

So that’s who’s been sitting behind every post about budgeting and burnout and bathroom schedules and the day my job disappeared. They’re the reason I open the laptop on the nights I’m tired, the days I’m stretched thin, and even when I genuinely don’t feel like it. Because I’m proud of my single mom family, proud of being a mother; it’s one of the things I know well, live well, and have a lot to say about.

They are the constant in everything and what I’m most certain of in a life that has had plenty of uncertain moments.

Twenty-one posts in on The Working Mom Method, and if you’re new here, SA Mom Blogs is a good place to find more South African mom content while you’re getting acquainted.

If you want to follow where this goes next, I’d love to have you along.