Parenting Guilt ...

So this is mostly from the viewpoint of a single parent, but I know (from having been married for six years of my motherhood) that all parents occasionally have this feeling. I said in the last archived post that I brought back to life that "I miss my kids like crazy when they're gone, and they drive me crazy when they're here" ... that's not an uncommon sentiment in the single-parent world ... and it creates this little thing I like to call guilt ...

I had a friend and co-worker tell me once, right after my ex and I split, "I love my husband, but maybe we should get divorced just so every other weekend at least I'd get a break from my kids." ... I think she was
about half kidding. As a stay at home mom to two toddlers, one of them special needs, and a husband that worked sixty hours a week ... she did need a break ...

My kids go to their dad's this weekend, then they come back here for ten days ... and then they will be gone the entire month of October, sans two weekends. This is our parenting plan, our new custody arrangement put in place in a final (mutually agreed upon, with no fighting) decision that we came to before we handed it to the judge at the end of August ... every other month, every other weekend ... with a separate holiday schedule ...

So here's where's the guilt comes in ...

Is it wrong that there's a part of me that just can't wait until October? It's not that I don't love my kids or that I don't want them here ... but since I moved at the end of August, I feel like I have been going non-stop ... that I haven't had a break ... my weekends without them are full of plans that other people make for me ... and then they come back and it's back to getting up at six in the morning (and I am sooooo not a morning person) ... and dealing with homework and dinner, and, and, and ... I haven't had a chance to just breathe, to unpack really, to do the things I need to do for my personal, psychological & emotional health .... so I am looking forward to this time ... to get my shit together for lack of a better way to put it ... to do things on my own schedule ... to finally meet those couple friends for lunch that have been asking me to go ...

I know that once they've been gone a few days, I will miss them like crazy, them being gone for that long will probably, in the end, be depressing and saddening and it will be a very joyful thing when Halloween gets here, which happens to be one of my holidays this year, and I get them back one day early, for the month of November ... I don't think I will feel this way about December, but I might ... I think this break coming up may be the break I need and December will be much, much harder, but we will see ....

In the meantime I think I'm going to try to embrace this selfishness (which for a lifetime doormat does not come easily) ... and take this month as a gift ... and to try very hard to not feel guilty about it ...