Inhumane

Inhumane.

That is what I told my friend being a single mother is when my husband left our house and that is how it still feels to me.

Dr Suess says alone is something you'll be quite a lot - and that is something I feel all the time now. I am alone. I am exhausted. I am fuming inside all the time and occasionally this spills over onto these two small children that I absolutely adore.

Unfair. That is how it feels. My two-year-old runs around saying "I am angry. I am sad. I am not OK". My five-year-old kicks her in the gut hard. He says it is because he is angry his dad is gone.

Sometimes I feel we live like animals. Mostly I feel he is an animal for leaving us this way. For his fucking booze and the cocaine he still won't admit to after all this time.

Addicts are animals. My father-in-law who told me I was stupid the last time I talked to him. When I had called him sobbing after I found the cocaine and later wrote him a poem about him making me feel like a nobody. He said he didn't understand "this commentary". It was a poem you animal, you nobody, you stupid, terrible man.

Inhumane.

No one offering to help me with these children other than my mother. The exhaustion that creeps in every day. The chores that don't stop. The bills that don't stop. My to-do-list that only seems to grow.

Inhumane

My friends' girlfriend tells me 'sometimes I just say yes because they just keep asking and asking and asking and I am just too tired to say anything else and I just cannot take it anymore.'. Her kids are 10 and 7 and I think - this is what I have to look forward to. Life just getting more and more out of control and making sacrifices with future boyfriends because I have children while he is out doing whatever he wants - like it has always been. Because we are the mothers. That is what we are supposed to do.

I see a mother at the doctor’s office speaking to her children in that mother voice that isn't real and I think at least, I hope, I am always real with my children. At least I have not come to that. But then I think, isn't it sad that I even have to ask now? I am not sure of anything anymore.

Inhumane.

The looks I get from people when I am with my children when I don't wear my six-carats of wedding ring. Yes, it changes things. Substantially.

Inhumane.

I am now wearing a size Zero. I have become a Zero. This wasn't supposed to happen to me - I look like Catherine Zeta-Jones for God's sake - at least that's what everyone is always telling me - or did before I started disappearing. I don't know who I am anymore or where I am going or especially how the fuck I got here. I have an MBA. I was making a good salary. This wasn't the plan. This wasn't the life I thought I would have. But here I am. A single mother. And it just feels inhumane and wrong.

The sad thing is that I know that I am one of the lucky ones. I am privileged. I at least have some money. I could make the difficult choice to go back to work to support my children. And things are not as rocky as they could be.

But whenever I think of my situation, or what is happening to my children now, only one word comes to mind….

Inhumane.



* I wrote this last year while separated from my husband.