by Jenny Runkel, Co-Founder, ScreamFree Living, Inc.

This past Christmas, Hal and I got to spend time with some of our favorite people in the world, Owen and Jodi Egerton. Just their names alone are cool, don't you think? Owen is an old college buddy of Hal's. Well, buddy doesn't quite describe Owen. "Pet" might be a better word. Owen used to live in a VW van while he was just out of college and writing his first novel, Marshall Hollenzer is Driving, but I digress.

Owen and Jodi are this amazingly quirky and funny couple who live in Austin, Texas. They met while both working on a comedy improv team and they are ridiculously in love. We spent the weekend with them recently and they reintroduced us to world we had almost forgotten ever really existed. A world full of Jazz clubs and late night pancake stops. Of laughter late in the night and early into the morning. Of philosophical talks over lingering cups of coffee. Real coffee. The kind that holds up your spoon once you stop stirring. The kind that Captain Quackenbush's Café used to make when I was in college at UT- Austin.

Quack's was wonderful. On any given night, at any given time, you could find anything there. Cozy couples lounging in the corner, desperate students poring over notes, wannabe street messiahs hailing the rapture, and one heck of a cup of joe. There was a bookstore of sorts attached to the café where you could borrow books on any subject imaginable and peruse its pages while some local kid casually strummed his guitar on the makeshift stage. It was really something.

I used to live at Quack's. I used to read philosophy. I used to be hungry for knowledge. I used to see live music, even if it was bad. I used to. I used to. Now, my days are filled with attending practices and checking homework. I spend more time in my minivan than I ever thought possible, driving to birthday parties for kids I don't even really know.

Don't get me wrong, I love my life. I have an adoring husband, two beautiful children, and a quaint, brick house with a fenced-in backyard. I live just down the street from a nice shopping center with a Super WalMart where I can go to find anything I could ever want. I can even drive through the Starbucks next door for a Vanilla Latte on the way home. And then it hits me like a dirty load of laundry. I only go to chain restaurants. My subdivision actually has a white picket fence. Adventure is wondering if tonight's CSI episode will be new or a rerun. People actually refer to me as "Hannah's Mom". It is official. I have become one. I am a minivan driving, cell-phone wearing, bland, boring, suburbanite soccer mom. The horror! The horror! When did my battle cry change from, "I am woman hear me roar!" to "I am mother, watch me bore!"?

In this section of our newsletter, we have Hal answer a direct question asked by one of our ScreamFree Parents. Today's question addresses some of the unique issues faced by some of my favorite people, single parents.

HELLO, I AM A SINGLE MOTHER OF 5 YOUNG CHILDREN!! (4boys/1girl) I really need to know how to talk to my children. The kids' dad doesn't have that much to do with them, and that makes it really hard on my boys. I heard you on the FISH radio station one day. Can you please help? Thanks and God bless.

Single-parents are some of my heroes, because I know this parenting thing is hard enough for my wife and me together. Even during the short times I'm doing it on my own (say, when my wife goes out of town for the weekend), I feel challenged to grow in new ways.

But as you've expressed here, it's not just doing it on your own most of the time, it's also having to deal with the absent parent still being a relevant factor in your children's lives, sometimes exactly because they're absent! So that leaves you dealing with your kids' hurt feelings and disappointed expectations, as well as leaving you as an easy target because you're the parent who's actually around. It's easy for them to take out their incredible emotions on you.

And it's easy for you to take yours out on them. I know it sounds impossible, but the best thing single parents can do is make it clear to themselves and their children that they do not exclusively belong to one another. Your kids do not exclusively belong to you, and you do not belong exclusively to them. That means creating space for everyone to own their own lives. That means listening to your kids' pain about their father without trying to defend, accuse, or make up for him. That also means listening to their anger towards you realizing that some of it is directed at you, and some is really aimed at their father.

Above all, it means focusing on yourself and your own emotional processes so that you don't add your mess to the one already their. And this means learning to care for yourself without needing your kids' or your husband's cooperation.

You are the only one that depends completely on you.

And remember to take care,
Hal

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