In the Parenting Blog yesterday, I wrote a fun little piece about surviving as a parent by taking a break from being a parent for a short time—just pretending for an hour or two that you are not a mom or a dad and getting out of that identity. For single parents, I KNOW this can be especially hard. After all, we don’t normally have any back-up and we cannot just turn things off and head out the door on a whim. What I do think we can do, however, is train ourselves to do something occasionally just for us…
I know firsthand how difficult this can be. It wasn’t until I had been a parent for more that 10 years that I was able to start working on this one. I felt guilty if I spent any money on just myself, fearing that even if I “thought” I had the discretionary income, something with one or all of the kids would come up and I would have “blown” the money on myself. It took time and practice for me to realize that doing or buying something just for myself—not because I needed it for work or because it would benefit the whole family—was important and healthy.
I am still not great at it, but I am getting better. I started simply with things like taking myself to a movie or buying a small piece of costume or artisan jewelry. It took years before I was able to take myself out to dinner just for fun (no date, no “working dinner”—just someplace I wanted to go for me) and then to eventually take a trip without my kids. As single parents, we become so conditioned to giving and caretaking and since many of us are on tight budgets—every single resource goes toward family and children. Of course, I still believe that my children come first and I put their needs before mine easily—but I have also learned that when I can do something just for myself, the whole family benefits too.