©Julia Welstead, May 2012

Crickey! Adrenaline slump! My technical term for feeling ghastly after a big effort has been exerted to achieve something, or to get over a big hurdle. In my case I’m in a post-delivery-of-boy-slump – not the giving birth variety of delivery, but the rucksack full of camping gear, get to the school-trip-bus in time type.  Youngest boy is going on a two week camping and hiking trip in the Cairngorms, which is a real ‘yippee’ event, but getting him ready for it seems to have involved a weekend of me chasing my tail, running around like a headless chicken etc etc trying to get everything on the ‘kit list’ without spending any money, whilst the fourteen year old boy in question communed with the sofa and ate a lot – to build up his strength. I know, I know, I hear you – I create a rod for my own back, I’m my own worst enemy etc etc. I have no excuses to offer except that it’s actually more exhausting trying to get a teenage boy to do something, than it is to just get on and do it oneself.

I did make him pack his own bags this time. On his last trip he spent the entire ten days assuming he hadn’t got certain crucial items of kit, and borrowing from other boys, where in fact said items had been bought by over-zealous moi, involving much pain to the pinch-thin-purse, and were neatly folded, by muggins here, in the bottom of his bag (name tags stitched on at midnight etcetera).

The last vestiges of adrenaline coursing my veins just get me home through the rush hour traffic, but parallel parking is suddenly difficult, despite it being the same space that I came out of only 20 minutes ago: with adrenaline slump setting in, my spatial awareness has gone to pot and a lot of backing and filling and hanging out of my seat with the door open in an effort to line up with the pavement, is required to eventually get the car to look as if someone has parked rather than just landed. Not my finest effort though: sorry Dad, you wouldn’t be proud.

Once in the house I sort of drift. I can’t decide what to do and can’t settle. I’m like tumbleweed: aimless and useless and yet unable to stay still. This is classic adrenaline-slump: the brain can’t even function enough to know that what is needed is a good curl-up on the (recently vacated) sofa with a milky coffee and a book, or maybe even a closing of the eyes for a catnap. Something on my right hand catches my eye and I focus in on ‘camera’ and ‘socks’ scrawled on skin in blue biro, and for no reason at all these words bring tears. It’s not the obvious: that he doesn’t have camera or socks. I think it’s precisely the opposite: that he does have these things, because I was in ASDA at 6am this morning buying them. Just as he has an ice-cream tub bulging with brownies and a biscuit tin heavy with tiffin, because I was up late last night baking them (in response to the ‘no pressure’ request for some home-baking from each household to be taken on expedition), and he has a wrist watch (which none of us ever wear anymore), because it was me who bothered to read the kit list and order an extremely cheap one online, and he has enough clean knickers (‘boxers’ Mum!) for two weeks because I made sure to wash them all in time. And so on and so forth.

The tears aren’t about these things of course (well I hope not, that would be pathetic), but something deeper. They are because I have yet again drained my emotional and physical self in order to see one of my sons right, to keep the whole jamboree on the road, to not let the side down etc etc. (you’ll notice I keep writing ‘etc etc’, this is because my brain is too tired to think of more examples, which is in itself a symptom of adrenaline-slump). 

Please don’t misunderstand: I wholly love my sons and want everything to be OK for them, which is why I go merrily galloping down the mum-as-martyr lane without a second thought. And my sons are very appreciative of my care of them – more so than some kids, I imagine. A wee snooze or book read and I’ll be fine and will put all this back in perspective. But that’s why I wanted to write this right now, in the post-effort collapse phase, because I think all mums do this to some extent, and I reckon single mums do it most of all: really go the extra mile in a constant and never-ending effort to compensate for the glaringly obvious short-coming of there being no dad around to help.

I hear cries of dissent from all the married mums who think they are still ‘doing it all’ and the single dads who definitely are ‘doing it all’ but I’m going to stick to my guns here. I think there is a very specific form of this parent-as-martyr condition that only us single mums are capable of. Armed to the gills with our guilt that our children are not growing up in the perfect two-parent nuclear family, we pull out all the stops: the right juice in the packed lunch, the right boot socks, the correct amount of spending money, the requisite number of t-shirts and trousers and the best home-baking. And once it’s all done and the child has gone off happily on the bus (and forgotten to look out and wave), the single-mum’s lot is to go back to an empty house and pace aimlessly and probably shed a few tears.

Too much self pity? Put the violins away Jules? Well OK then, fair do’s. I’ll get that coffee and listen to Woman’s Hour.

Apparently it has been ‘single parent week’ all week on Woman’s Hour. I missed that (too busy being one). I look up the archives podcasts and hear all variety of stuff about negotiating with the absent father (tough if he’s gone down-under, or is indeed six-feet-under), managing scant finances, how the children are affected and the ongoing, albeit more muffled, stigma attached to singledom. And then there’s the thorny question of finding a new partner and here I can identify with all the callers and presenters comments. For the moral mum, it is nigh on impossible to find a new long-term partner. You may scoff, but think it through. 

Going out in the evening is tricky in terms of money, childcare and energy levels (I’m in bed by nine in order to get up at 5am to take middle son to swim training, walk the dogs in lovely quiet woods and visit ASDA when no one but the shelf-stackers can hinder my whizz round the aisles). Then, say you do chance upon that rarest of things – the single, sane, sexy, solvent, sub-sixty (insert your acceptable upper age limit – a male friend of mine is upset that mine is sixty, but I said I’d only raise the bar for Sir Ranulph Fiennes) fella, and you like him and he appears to like you and he lives close enough that you can meet sometimes, and he doesn’t mind that you have lots of children and no money, how on earth do you go about introducing this hero to your children? And, more to the point, how can this budding relationship ever be allowed to develop at a natural pace? If you introduce them then you either have to come to terms with your children meeting a few different men, or you have to be sure that he’s ‘the one’ (which of course is impossible).

Meanwhile their Dad is living alone and has therefore been free to explore his options (ah there’s a nice way of putting it) and has landed himself a twenty-something busty blonde who gives your kids sweeties at weekends. Hands up all those who have experienced that eye-popping, hair-tearing moment when one of our wee darlings tells us we really should get ourselves a boyfriend, ‘cos dad’s got a really nice girlfriend?! Aaarrgh! 

Stop! Too much on the self-pity! Time to get on with that best known and most effective distraction activity and dissipater of all known frustrations (sexual included) – hoovering.

I’ll sort the motherhood: martyrdom conundrum later (a few decades later probably).