Still in a turkey coma? I wish I was, too much cleaning and decorating going on at my house. Remember the good old days when Mom just made everything magically appear and all you had to do was enjoy? When I was growing up the tradition was that Santa put the tree up on Christmas Eve. Looking back I’m not sure if that made things harder or easier. Especially when my mother was a single mother. It’s so hard to get everything ready all by yourself.
I can’t imagine how hard that was to do alone. Get the kids to bed, drag that tree inside, get it decorated and all the presents under it. No wonder we found Mom asleep on the couch most Christmas mornings. I’m glad that’s one tradition from my childhood that I didn’t bring into my family. I would go crazy trying to do all that at the last minute.
It made me wonder how many other areas of our lives do we make harder on ourselves as single parents. Are there traditions, routines or habits that you continue to do because you done them for so long that actually make your life harder?
I know one thing I’ve continued that makes my life harder. When I was married my ex husband didn’t think Hailey should do chores and when we divorced I continued that, not wanting to change her life so drastically. Now looking back I should have had Hailey do chores. I should have told her that I needed her help and since we were in this together we needed to help each other out. But I didn’t do that, Instead I continued to do it all myself. That was a mistake. If I had it all to do over again I would have had her help more, be more involved in the amount of work it took to run our household. It certainly would have cut down on some of the stress for me.