Single Parent Sundays
Pacing your weekend when you’re not in a 2.4, and how bank holidays can sometimes feel a bit much
“You know there are hardly any people I’d want to spend a Sunday with”, my friend says. We’re on the phone making plans to go for a walk in Wicklow the next weekend. I know immediately what she means. Sundays are a down-time day. You want to spend them with people who require little effort, who are easy to be with. Sometimes, even with the loveliest of friends, there can be an effort required in socialising. Which is fine for the rest of the week. But on a Sunday you want to just be, but maybe be in the company of other people.
My friend is also a single parent. How do you do family day when your family isn’t the traditional kind, and you want some adult company too? In the car on the way home the next week, after our walk, she tells me the phrase TV stations use for Sunday evening viewing; warm bath TV. These are the kinds of vibes you want from the people you’re spending your Sunday with.
If you are a single parent, or for other reasons fall outside the 2.4-ish life, pacing your weekend can be tricky. I’ve been thinking about pacing a lot since reading this article by Penny Wincer in which she describes pacing in the context of energy levels (Penny’s writing is generally wonderful but I think if you’re a single parent, it is especially meaningful).
I’ve been a single parent for seven years. By now, I mostly have normal, two-day weekends down. Our Saturdays are fairly structured; swimming, pancakes at our friends afterwards, gymnastics, dinner and of late, Downton (Abbey). I’ve realised that certain friends disappear into family time at weekends and that’s fine, it’s not personal. You find the people who do not.
Sundays my daughter is with her father, and I usually work. It’s not ideal, sometimes my mother looks at me slightly wistfully and talks about Sundays when she was a child, as a day of rest, and I know she’s thinking you’re working too hard.
Initially, I worked on Sundays I think as a sort of distraction from the non-family-day-ishness of it all. Now, it’s more about the pacing of my week. Being a single parent can be exhausting, and much as I would love to keep work tidily between Monday – Friday, some weekdays I’m wrecked, or drowning in housework, and all the work doesn’t get done in those hours. Or there is more work needing to be done than can fit in a five-day week. Or I might take a weekday morning or afternoon off to do something with the daughter or friends and work bleeds into the weekend.
I’m trying to pull it back, on some weekends at least, because I think repeatedly going into another week without having properly switched off takes its toll, and after the great burnout of 2023 (I assume that wasn’t just me but, I increasingly get the sense…all of us?) I know I need to ringfence off some Sundays. Hence the walk with my friend, which was lovely, a catch up so engaged that we managed to walk for three hours and not once, bar a distant glimpse through trees early on, see the lake, the circling of which was the actual aim of the walk, instead taking off on some lake-adjacent route I think we created ourselves.
We agreed, on said walk, that bank holidays can still feel a little daunting as a single parent. That one extra day has the capability to push you over from managing to swamped. Getting the balance between planning enough so you’re not at too much of a loose end, and not scheduling your weekend to within an inch of its life, is tricky.
We’re going away next weekend, so what I really want to do this three-day-weekend is potter, tidy the house, get ahead of work before the Easter holidays, hang out with friends a bit but also go to bed really early with the new David Nicholls and Marian Keyes books. But there is the underlying slight edge of fear; if you don’t plan, there can suddenly come a tipping point as a single parent on a bank holiday, from enjoyable downtime, to feeling adrift, a little too on the outside of things.
I never especially identified with the subtitle of my first book From Breaking Up to Book Clubs to Being Enough- Things I’ve learned About Finding and Losing Love. It was suggested by my editor, who knows things about getting across what a book is about, and whom I trusted completely, so that was fine. It had the title I had suggested, How to Fall Apart, and I loved the cover.
It’s only now that the being enough part feels like it lands. When you become a single parent, much of the initial struggle can be about proving, to yourself, your child, the general world-at-large, that this new unit with only one adult is enough. That you’re a valid family unit.
I think in the initial years, I thought feeling enough was going to be a permanent landing spot. I would get, there and that would be it. I see it differently now.