How do you date as a single parent?

It has been almost three years since my divorce was finalized.  I am finally starting to feel like I am getting the hang of being a full time single parent and am starting to think about dating again.  When it comes to dating I am VERY shy so I haven’t done anything about finding someone to date yet.  Besides, being a full time single parent there isn’t much time left for you in the first place, let alone time for dating.  The last couple weekends have been filled with selling Girl Scout cookies with my daughter at the local grocery store.  Last Saturday I realized how much more difficult is was going to be for me.

Selling cookies started out the same as two weeks before.  The girls were full of energy saying hello to everyone going in and ask those going out if they out like to buy some cookies.  They are only Daisy Scouts, 1st graders, so after about 20 minutes they wanted to switch to the other door.  The other dad and I worked out with the girls that they would need to wait until the first hour was over before any switching.  This re-energized the girls for a while and when the hour was up it was time to switch.  One of the moms that was at the other door brought a girl from over there and took my smiling & giggling Tiffany back with her.  At our door the two girls were greeting and selling with new energy.  About 20 minutes later the mom from the other door is back with Tiffany, who is now sad & crying.  After some comforting she asks me when I am going to get married again so she can have a step mom.  She says “I just want a mom”.

I knew that she was upset with her mom because of inconsistent contact and not seeing her for the last two years but wasn’t prepared for that.  No matter how good of a dad I am, I can never be a mom to my kids.  My daughter just wants to be like the other girls in her troop that have their moms doing things with them.  I know now that my daughter would quickly attach herself to any woman that comes into her life.  This scares me because I don’t know how I am going to truly get to know someone if I can’t have them be around my kids.  The thought of dating scares me in the first place being shy.  On top of that that I have a terrible relationship, if you could even call it that, with my ex and being a full time single parent it is hard to think of good selling points to a possible new partner.  I know I have a lot of other good qualities but my bad ones often show up on the list of things people are looking to avoid.  If I did have the time where would I look anyway?

Am I suppose to find one of my son or daughter’s friends that have single moms and ask if I can setup a play date for the kids and myself?  Or how about asking their single Music teacher for an after hours conference?  I now know that neither of these would be possible, I need to find someone that would not be a part of their daily lives if things didn’t work out.  This just gives me more anxiety about dating because now I am not just choosing someone that I will love but they also must be good to my children.  Since my last choice, their mother, didn’t turn out so good I am a little gun shy.

Unless I happen to stumble into a wonderful woman that would be great for me and my kids, and she is forward enough to let me know she is interested.  Who am I kidding?  I bet if a woman like that came into my life I would probably be too scared to respond.  Fortunately for me the spring weather, that is finally starting to show up, always makes me feel better about myself.  Hopefully I can use that to be get over some my insecurities and become more outgoing when it comes to meeting woman.  Now I just need to find somewhere to meet them, time too look for them and time to spend with them.  Seems like a tall order to me but I need to do if for me and my kids.

Will my ex ever become a parent to our kids?

This is a question I often ask myself and unfortunately I think I already know the answer, NO.  The little contact my ex has with our kids is on the phone, and normally starts with her telling them over and over how much she misses them.  Every few months she feels guilty enough, when she happens to have some money, to tell them she is going to send them some gifts and promising them it will be sent the next day.  When it doesn’t show up in a week or so the kids get upset and either won’t talk to her or now my son with yell at her.  In fact last week I over heard him telling her “Mommy how would you feel if you were the kids and I was the parent and I didn’t send you the gift I promised.  You would be very sad.” when we got home and the present wasn’t there.  My son started wetting his bed again that night, something he hasn’t done in at least six months.  He is starting to wonder why he started doing it again, “Is it because I had something to drink or didn’t go to the bathroom before bed”.  I thing it has to do with him missing his mom and being upset with her for not following through, but don’t think that will be understood by him since he is only 8.  It is amazing though that he often seems more mature about things than his mother is.  Why can’t she just call them two or three times a week, consistently?  Don’t do it this week and then don’t call for a week or two and then call every day for 3 or 4 days.  When she calls to much they don’t want to talk with her and that makes her mad so she won’t call for a while.  Why can’t she understand they are only 6 and 8, and they need consistancy?

Other than talking on the phone with the kids I would love for her to spend some time with the kids.  They need and want to spend time with her and I love them dearly but I need some time to myself also.  Unfortunately that means she has to pay for the tickets and since she hasn’t worked since leaving Washington state I don’t know when the next time they will be visiting her.  She is always talking about trying to move back here but I will not hold my breath, since she hasn’t followed through with anything for some time.  I really hope she doesn’t move back here because of all the drama that would come with it.  I am also not sure that even if she did have the money for ticket right now that I would let the kids go see her.  The problem is that she got a DUI on 1/7/2011.  Her sentencing was shortly after the last time the kids saw her, during spring break last year.  I found this all out when I was trying to find out the status some paperwork for getting New Mexico to collect child support, which I know I will never receive.  Turns out she decided to not pay the court ordered fine, go to the DWI school or do the community service.  Right now there is actually a warrant for her arrest and she knows I know about it.  She keeps telling me I don’t know anything about her case but she is getting it taken care of.  Should I let her have the kids before this is taken care of?  I would hate to have them go to visit, and she gets pulled over for any reason.  She would immediately go to jail and the kids would be with Child Protective Services until I was able to go pick them up, or hopefully my mom could do it again.  I don’t want them to have to do through that though.  I guess that is the real reason she has been talking about moving back here so much recently with the kids, that is her way of dealing with it; to run.  She figures if she leaves New Mexico she won’t have to deal with the arrest warrant any longer.  And I won’t let her have time with the kids now until she does get it dealt with.  Am I being mean and vindictive or am I just protecting my kids?

How I became a single father

My ex-wife and I met online in Sept of 2001, two days before 9/11 happened, and were married in Jamaica on 12/27 of that same year.  Before we had kids we life was good and there were no worries.  Early in 2003 we decided to move from the condo she had before we got married into a house that would be closer to work for me, and give us room to grow our family when we decided to have kids.  It was good timing because we found out my ex was 2 weeks pregnant the day before signing.  Our son, Tommy, was born on 11/11/2003 and my ex became a stay at home mom from that point forward.  With her is was a love / hate thing with being a stay at home mom.  It drove her crazy, literally, but she wouldn’t let anyone else do it.  I encouraged her to get a job, even if it cost us for her to work, but she refused.  Instead she started to drink more and more.  She had always been a drinker before our son, but I hadn’t notice because she always bought, and probably because I didn’t want to know.  She didn’t drink, that I know of, while she was pregnant with our son but she couldn’t wait to have him so she could get drunk.  Our daughter came sixteen months later and again my ex was able to stop drinking for the pregnancy but once our daughter was born there was no stopping her.

Over the next four years we had our ups and downs.  During one of her beer drinking binges in June of 2007 I decided I had enough and moved into an apartment with the intention of getting a divorce.  She talked me into counseling, and things seemed to get better so I moved back in but kept the apartment since I had a 6 month lease I couldn’t get out of.  Turns out that was a good thing.  Shortly after my moving back into the house she had started drinking a 1/5 of Patron a day, with half of it finished by the time I got home from work.  Keep in mind that she was a stay at home mom with a 2 and 4-year-old at the time.  I brought her drinking up in one of our counseling sessions and she walked out.  That was the point I knew our marriage was over.  I found an attorney and filed for divorce on 11/1/2007.  The divorce seemed to go on for ever, with her accusing me of everything under the sun.  It was final on 7/23/2009 with us getting joint custody, something I would have agreed to at the very beginning.  The only problem was she wanted to move back home to her family in New Mexico, with the kids.  There was no way I was going to willingly let my kids be so far away from me without a fight.

She had received around $34,000 in the divorce settlement and two months later is was all gone.  She ended up getting evicted from her apartment and by the end of the year she decided she couldn’t afford to live in Washington state so she left the kids with me and moved back to where she grew up, New Mexico.  On 3/3/2010 the parenting plan was change so that I was officially the full-time parent with my ex-wife getting spring break, 6 weeks during the summer and every other Christmas, but she has to come here or pay to fly the kids there.  Since my ex moved out-of-state in Dec 2009 she has spent time with the kids three times.  The first was shortly after the parenting plan was changed for spring break 2010.  She came to stay with a friend she had from her job before she moved, with the hopes of finding a job.  She was in town for 5 days, before the friend kicked her off the couch, and she saw the kids for about 4 hours because she was looking for work the rest of the time.  The next time was that summer.  The left to see her about two weeks after school got out, the plan was to be there for 6 weeks.  After 4 1/2 weeks I got a call from her that she needed the kids to leave early.  After lots of drama I ended up having my mom, who lives in Tucson, drive to pick up the kids from her.  The third time was spring break last year, they flew to visit her for 4 days.  Since then the only contact my kids have with her is an occasional phone call, never anything consistent.  This is of course all from my perspective, I am sure she wouldn’t agree with my interpretation of anything.

I started this blog so that I have a place to get things off of my chest and to keep track of some of the humorous things that go on in my life as a single parent.  I find that sometimes just being able to talk or write about something helps to make it a little easier to deal with.