This week I received a lovely Christmas card with a return address stamped on the envelope, that began with the words “From The Pearson Family”. Immediately I thought how much I’d like to get an old-fashioned stamp like that made for my cards, too, and do things properly. Then I wondered how silly I’d feel calling us “The Heawood Family” when it’s just me and a three-year-old in our house, along with some fish fingers and farts and Taylor Swift videos. Then I remembered that I hadn’t bought any cards anyway. But mostly I realised that it was there again – that background hum.
However hard you try to move away from it, and however happy and fulfilled your life actually is, there is always this feeling, as a single-parent family, that there is something missing from the narrative. That your small family unit is just a bit lopsided – and there is no time of year when that narrative rises to the surface more than at Christmas, which is all about the tradition of family and the happy home.
It rises up in funny places. In little things. You want a Christmas tree that isn’t wonky. It becomes imperative to you that the show will go on, and your living room will contain this symbolic and beautiful thing. But once you’ve bought it, and erected it, you can’t get it to stand up straight. You want more for the tree. You cover the tree in baubles but the tree starts making you sad. You don’t want the tree to look at you like that.
Every single-parent family is different. Some have another parent who shares the childcare, some have conflict, some have a right laugh. Some just miss someone horribly. Some are threatened, some are widowed, some are safe. Many are skint and some have their own stables full of ponies.
Personally, I’m lucky. I can pay the bills and buy nice things. And we’re also very happy, when I look at our day-to-day life. Especially since my daughter made an invisible friend called Disco Carrot, who has come to join us at mealtimes (and is apparently to blame for the farting). His favourite thing is tinsel and I’ve got to say, he seems like a lovely guy, apart from the stench, and all the crimes he keeps committing under his cloak of invisibility, such as stealing biscuits from handbags and scribbling on bedsheets with a felt-tip pen.
But the overriding story arc, fed to us since childhood, tells us that this picture is missing something. I still believe, somewhere deep inside, however much I fight it, that life should be like the clock tower I used to watch on the opening credits of Trumpton, where the man and the woman would come out and meet in the middle to ring in the new hour together. The symmetry of things. But why?
A couple of single-mother friends, with children older than mine, tell me they used to feel this quite keenly at Christmas. They worried that they weren’t really giving their kids the full experience – except that, actually, the kids seemed to have a great time and didn’t care as much as they thought they would. Eventually, one says, she realised her son had never known any different, and thought it was perfectly normal to celebrate with just his mum and a grumpy granny who didn’t much care for Christmas anyway. She told him stories about magical rabbits leaving a trail of chocolate droppings across their kitchen floor. He was spellbound by the mystery.
Meanwhile, I remember, growing up in my lovely nuclear family unit, with a mum and a dad who were still married and still loved each other, and still do, in our nice warm house, with my brilliant brother, getting loads of presents, and it all sometimes just descending into a horrible argument, and me abandoning the lunch to sit weeping on the stairs on Christmas Day. A bit dramatic, sure. Ungrateful, spoilt, I was probably all those things. But I just want those who have never been inside the perfect picture to know there are many people sitting inside that frame, crying their perfect eyes out.
And that outside of that narrative, which is usually a myth anyway, there are people with heartache and lopsided lives who have taken a deep breath, looked at their small joys, and decided to let it all go. And that they are simply having a wonderful Christmas time.
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