Part-Time Mom

on the experience of so much time without my kids

At one point, during a conversation with my ex as we stood by our cars after a particularly grueling couples therapy session, he looked at me with anguish in his eyes. “I don’t want to be a part-time dad,” he said. He said this because he didn’t want to get divorced. Not because he wanted to stay married to me, necessarily. He just didn’t want to lose all that time with his kids. 

But I will never forget what went through my mind as he said those words. 

I would do anything to be a part-time mom.

It felt strange to admit that to myself. But I knew it was because I was suffocating in motherhood. It never stopped and as the primary parent, I was always on duty. I never got a freaking break.

Our disparate feelings about what would happen to our parenting in the midst of a separation are indicative of the vast gulf between being a mom and a dad in our society today.

I know he didn’t feel this way, but being a dad was already kind of a part time job for him. He went to work each morning after taking our kids to school. He came back home around 6 in the evening. Parenting for him was from 7-8:30 in the morning, and from 6-8 at night.¹ It was a 3 ½ hour gig each day during the week. 

For me, parenting was also from 7-8:30 in the morning. But then my shift picked back up around 2:15 when I had to get ready to pick my kid up from school. On Wednesdays, it resumed at 1:15. Thus my shift, in comparison, was 6 hours each day. Add up the difference and I was parenting 12.5 more hours per week than he was (and this was when both kids were in full-time school. Don’t get me started on the toddler years). That is not to mention all the additional work I was doing to run a household and carry the mental load. That is before you factor in the weekends and his golf hobby.

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I was reading an article recently and it talked about how fatherhood can be grounding for a man. Give him roots. Keep him stable. While I don’t think motherhood would ever be called grounding. Or maybe it’s so grounding that you get buried. Motherhood toppled me. Upended everything about my life. My life became unrecognizable to me.

Now, strangely enough, I am technically a part-time mom (though read on for why I don’t think this term really applies). My ex and I are splitting custody 50/50 right now. How do I like being a part-time mom? Well, some aspects are wonderful. It is 2:43 as I write this and I am not expecting to be interrupted by the bustle of kids storming through the door, dropping backpacks, and rummaging for snacks like bears fresh out of hibernation. Instead, I can just keep right on writing, with no disruption to my creativity. I can stop working when I’m hungry, make a “girl dinner” of nachos or a rice bowl, and do whatever I want for the rest of the night. There is a lot of freedom in my days when my kids aren’t with me, a freedom I haven’t experienced in almost 12 years. Yesterday I stayed in bed until 8:30. Yes, you read that right. (Now, today I was up bright and early to head over to their dad’s house to help them get ready for Halloween. There are still some things they need their mom for, namely, curling of hair).

a bonus of being up that early and out of the house

But there are also parts of being a ‘part-time mom’ that are painful. My ex and I just nailed down how we will split the holidays, our first in two households. The thought of not being with my kids all day on Christmas feels unimaginable. Trying to figure out the fairest way to divide that time was not easy. 

It is strange to only have two weekends each month with my kids. Some months I’ll try and travel when they aren’t with me, a silver lining for sure. But other months, there is a complicated calculus to squeeze all the fun stuff in on my weekends, like trips to the pumpkin patch or the Christmas Tree Farm, scheduling longstanding traditions and getting to see family.

Most of the time I feel okay when they are away from me. The hardest days are the transition days: when I take them to school but they return from school to their dad’s. I feel this weird uneasiness all day, that I won’t see them before bed, that I won’t know what they’re having for dinner. I usually do a good bit of cleaning that day, getting their rooms ready for them so they are tidy for the next time they are here, doing laundry so everything is in its place. I know it is just a coping mechanism for dealing with the anxiety that they are not with me. Sometimes, when I go to sleep when they are not in their rooms, it feels peaceful. Sometimes, I feel sick to my stomach.

another bonus: getting texts like this from your 10-year-old

The first few months of separated living felt wonderful. I had this new house I’d moved into, two cats I was getting to know. A sense of relief pervaded my days that I had ejected myself from a situation that had not been serving me. I hadn’t had enough time by myself for a decade so I relished each weekend with no plans, stacked books on my bedside table, blitzed through Netflix shows I hadn’t had time to watch. It felt like the ultimate vacation and I couldn’t believe I was getting away with it. 

But now that this is the new normal, it feels less shiny, those days without them. I’m still grateful for all the time I have to read. I know I would not have been able to finish a draft of my manuscript except for the fact that right now, I am a part-time Mom. 

But of course I’m not a part-time Mom, am I? I am a mom every moment of the day, even when they are not in my custody. They Facetime me after school. We text at night before bed. There is always something they have left behind that they ask me to bring over. Today, I need to schedule a doctor’s appointment. I’ll be accompanying my youngest as she trick or treats tonight even though it is technically “not my night.”

On the weekends when they are not with me, they often find a reason to stop by. This is the very reason I rented a house just three blocks from their father’s. I wanted them to feel like I was never too far away. And I’m not. Especially in my soul.

For as Rachel Cusk deftly writes:

“Birth is not merely that which divides women from men; it also divides women from themselves, so that a woman’s understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed. Another person has existed in her, and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them, she is not herself; when she is without them, she is not herself, and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.” 

Clover Stroud puts it this way: “Lester is over a hundred miles away from me. But he’s with me in spirit, tugging at me, all of the time.”

Now, perhaps that is true for dads. That they aren’t part-time Dads when they work full-time and have shorter parenting shifts. But traditionally, a dad is able to check out from parenting during his work day in a way a mom who works full-time cannot. We all know who gets called when a kid is sick. We all know who is fielding texts from fellow moms regarding when trick or treating should start tonight and where. One of the reasons I longed for a wife is I wanted the feeling of care that is accompanied by someone at home managing the household and schedule. Women are trained to think about what others need, to do all the equations of who needs to be where when, and what they need to have with them. Men haven’t been taught to do this and for the most part, unless they have been tasked with something (like after school sports schedules), they get to go about their day knowing someone else is holding that rope. Then they just show up. Their presence is all that’s required. Everything else is taken care of. 

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I desperately want this to be different. Some of the reason this Substack exists is so that we can name this problem and start to do something about it. I think it starts with how we raise boys (follow this Instagram account for how Sam Kelly is doing this). I think it also starts with paternity leave, and not just paternity leave that overlaps with mom’s maternity leave. This kind of ownership of care and concern requires that the father be the sole one on duty, the only one ensuring that if they leave the house, diapers are in the diaper bag along with the favorite binky. Let dad feel the pain of a skipped nap once or twice and he won’t insist on being “fun dad” on the weekends. He will know the consequences of staying out thirty minutes too late.

This is the extreme training of early motherhood, and it is extreme and it is painful. Dads need this, too, so that they can learn the calculus, so they aren’t stuck thinking parenting is addition and subtraction, simple presence in the house instead of a deep layer of emotional availability and scanning of needs that is the signal of a truly attuned parent.

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I wish that I had been able to craft a form of motherhood that wasn’t so all consuming, so suffocating that I wanted to escape. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t the mothering that bothered me but the wife-ing. Because now that I am not a wife, I enjoy being a mother so much more. But that’s because I get breaks. Not every divorced mother gets that.

Sometimes I wish I had less breaks than I do now. A split more like 60/40 might feel more comfortable. But 50/50 is what we have agreed to. For now, it is…okay. Not great. But I also know this is the biggest learning curve that any of us have gone through, trying to transition from being a family of four, under one roof all the time, to being two families of three. We’re all constantly shifting, from one house to another, from full time parenting to being on the fringes. Learning how to coparent is no joke.

I only moved out in February. This is all so new. There has been so much change. 

But I also think that we need to balance the scales. So no mother wishes she could be a part-time mom. So that motherhood and fatherhood truly felt like an equal task.

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GOING FURTHER:

“What Happened to My Egalitarian Relationship? with Mary Catherine Starr.” The Feminist Mom Podcast (Mary Catherine Starr is the creator of momlife_comics which are often featured in my posts).

“A 50/50 Custody Arrangement Could Save Your Marriage.”

Amy Shearn

in the New York Times. I will never stop sharing this essay.

“Spousal Scorekeeping, Bartering, and Stealing Food from Your Own Pantry.” The Milkless podcast (two dads talking about parenting).

Who Gets Quality Leisure? Culture Study. Anne Helen Petersen is always so good at this kind of analysis.

1. Now that our kids are older, they go to bed around 9:30. Though it is a longer shift, it is definitely less demanding as they can do so much else on their own (like get themselves ready for bed).