28-Day Pit Stop (September)

On the 28th day of each month (in honor of PMS and that whole menstrual cycle thing), we make a Pit-Stop to rally support for each other during a particular moment of PSM.

Submit a comment with your experience. Yours may be just the inspiration or the support or the laugh a PSM sister needs!!

This month's little adventure is entitled "Emotion", because being a single mom doesn't allow for a lot of emotion, but being a post-single mom is chock full of the stuff. Good, bad, warm, raw, funny, embarrassing, debilitating, enlightening emotion. Ick.

Kanji - Feel, Sense, EmotionWhile raising spawn, there's always so much to do and take care of and worry about, examining how you feel about things doesn't really come up much. Plus, you don't want to impart huge mood swings on your child(ren), so whatever does come up, you figure it's best to just keep it to yourself and wait it out. It's easy to think about other things, anyway. Like what's for dinner YET FREEKIN' AGAIN, or how you'll get Johnny to football and Susie to piano and attend a meeting all at 4pm, or that pesky $3,000 car insurance bill.

Then, they get ready to leave, and the whole world changes. They're happy and proud. Of course, you're happy and proud. And, if you're like me, on the inside, you're scared and miserable. After you grieve a bit, you enter what I call the Rehabilitation Stage of Post-Single Motherhood, which offers up a lot of self-analysis about what you want and how you feel about things. And feel, you do. Everything. Sometimes, magnified. Anger sounds louder. Sadness is paralyzing. Sappy things make you swimmy for days. And mildly happy things make you feel like your pre-teen girl self at a David Cassidy concert. (That's my thing - it may not be your thing - live and let live, I say.)

The point is that these feelings and senses and emotions have been locked inside your heart and your soul for so long, they jump up and down and run amuck when you just crack open the door. The buggers put their little heads and arms and feet in the jam so you have no choice but to let them out. Scary, because getting them back inside is next to impossible.

Emotions aren't something I was ever taught much about, so my reserve fit in nicely with my single mom, warrior lifestyle. But as a post-single mother with a half-open door, I can't say I'm at my most comfortable. A friend used a word in our recent conversation about life's little lessons: acceptance. I really like that word. It's freeing. It implies a kind, whispering secret of permission from yourself to yourself to just be.

So, I'm not recommending any distractions this month. I say to hell with it. Give into all of it! It's relentless anyway, so you might as well. I've done some silly (some say emotional, I say silly, tomayto, tamahto) things in 2010 that I'm collectively referring to as "research". If that helps, you're welcome to it.