When Failing To Find a Partner Feels Like Failing My Kids
This is the part of single parenting no one ever warned me about.
My son mentions, not for the first time, that he would like a stepdad. I suggest absently that I’ll just order one up on Amazon. At this point, he gets very excited that one might be in within one to two business days of arriving. I have to tell him I’m being sarcastic because he’s neurodivergent and really thought for a second there that I could secure a life partner as easily as I could order him another racetrack for his room.
If only it were that easy! There’s no way I’m going to break it to him that the system is a little more complicated than that. If I said I had to download an app and do the equivalent of online shopping for a partner, he wouldn’t understand why it isn’t as easy as simply picking someone out and ordering them up. He definitely wouldn’t understand why someone else wouldn’t immediately want to marry me, his mom.
When he realizes online shopping isn’t a real possibility outside of the long and arduous process of dating app usage, he begins asking about my ex. He always ends up going there, even when I ardently wish he wouldn’t. It’s painful, and it’s no less painful knowing that the question is coming. He wants to know why it didn’t work out. No amount of explaining that we can’t make people love us back will ever make sense to this child.
I’m being peer-pressured by my child to find a partner. He thinks we need the nuclear family that the public school system still promotes. His dad got a new wife and kids. He doesn’t understand why I can’t add to our family as easily.
He says it would be nice for me to have someone to help sometimes. What he doesn’t understand is that I had “help” in two relationships that ended up being a hindrance instead and making my life harder. A significant other doesn’t guarantee help, love, or a lack of loneliness. I know it would be different with the right person, but that person hasn’t shown up in my life to date. Yet, my failure to find him is being highlighted rather than his failure to appear. Such is the way of parenting.
I know it’s not rational, but sometimes I feel like my dating failures are failing my kids. I don’t want to settle for just anyone. I have no interest in providing them with a stepparent who wouldn’t treat them with as much love as biological children. But it sometimes stings that the very thing he most wants is the one thing it’s beyond my control to give him. The fact that he asks about my most recent relationship failure every single time we have this conversation is salt to my wound, especially because I had also thought that would be the relationship to go the distance.
It turns out that I was wrong. It happens sometimes. It’s a lot harder for a kid to understand why adults can’t just work things out and get along. One day, he’ll see for himself. In the meantime, he seems to be planning to continue to peer pressure me until our family grows. I added two kittens to our household, but it didn’t distract him from his main objective.
This is the part of single parenting that no one ever warned me about. I ask him why he wants a stepparent so much, and he tells me that it would be more people to love. It would be even better, he adds, if they have children, too. He wants a big family, and I’m happy enough with our small one. He’s going to learn that families look different, but it may take him a while to understand why that is — and why it’s completely okay for our family to just be us three.
On my hardest days, which are also my loneliest days, I grieve the fact that my choices contributed to my child feeling this way. I don’t mean the divorce — although, yes, that, too. All my choices played a role. I married someone who wasn’t compatible with me long-term, and I had children in that marriage. Now, I have children whose hearts yearn for more than they have, and it hurts that I can’t give it to them.
If I’m honest with myself, I’d like to have a long-term partner again. I haven’t decided how I feel about marriage. I don’t see it as truly beneficial to women most of the time. Yet, I have to admit that the idea of sharing my life with someone I love, someone who loves me back, sounds pretty good, but it’s not as easy as wishing for it and then waiting for it to happen.
I know I’m not actually failing my kids. That’s my inner bully talking. That’s just how it feels when he wants it so much, and I can’t adequately explain in a way he’ll understand why I can’t make it happen.
Plus, I can’t just secure a partner because he thinks our lives would be better with one. I can’t go out and make myself fall in love with someone any more than I can make someone I love return that love. But I can keep showing up and showing my child that a small family is still a family.
I try to get him to see that we can want a bigger family, but we don’t need one. I’ve been single parenting successfully for the majority of his life, and I know I can keep doing it. I can remind him that life is good just the way it is, and if someone else comes along eventually, that’ll be a wonderful surprise to add to our already amazing lives.
Life rarely works out the way we think it will. The family I have isn’t exactly the one I pictured growing up. I didn’t imagine co-parenting or custody arrangements. I always thought I’d get married one time, and that would be it. I learned that I am capable of more than I know, and I realized that a happy family of three was a much better deal than an unhappy family of four.
I don’t know what’s ahead, but I do know that I’m not failing my kids. Failing them would be staying in an unhappy marriage and teaching them to repeat those toxic patterns. Letting them have two healthier families isn’t what I would call a failure. It’s just different than what we’re taught we’re supposed to have. Unlearning that message might be the antidote to the inner bully’s persistent dialogue.
My son asks again about when I’m getting married. With no relationship on the dating horizon, my answers get increasingly ridiculous. He may not speak sarcasm, but he’s learning. I tell him if there’s a chance that I’ll be getting married, I’ll be sure to let him know. He seems to accept that answer — for now.
He’s still hopeful, and some days, I feel hopeful, too. Even on the days I’m skeptical, I tell myself what I’ve been telling him. Three makes a family, and anything beyond that will just be a delightful bonus in an already wonderful life.
