All the Single Ladies

Allow me to provide you with a piece of little-known knowledge: Single parenthood is tough.

As I'm sure you're well aware, daylight savings time recently gave us an extra hour. By "us," I mean anyone who doesn't have an infant.

Evelyn gets tired at the same time every night these days. She's almost always fast asleep in her crib by 10:30. I, being the night owl that I am, force myself to put away the laptop around 1 or 2 a.m. Evie then wakes up at 6:30 to eat, and if I'm lucky, she goes back to sleep for a couple hours.

And then daylight savings happened. Evie now dozes off around 9 and wakes up around 5:30, but I'm still retiring between 1 and 2. So every morning for the last week, I've been squinting my eyes open and searching the room for even a glimmer of sunlight while my daughter howls for breakfast.

Without fail, I always look around me to see if someone- anyone- will grant my truest wish and take care of Evie's pre-dawn demands for me. And without fail, no one magically appears.

Such is the plight of a single parent. Sure, there are plenty of people who want to help me with Evie, but you can never go through the day assuming that anyone will help you. You start and stop the waking hour under the pretense that it's all on you.

Luckily for me, I have an amazing, helpful family who has given me more than I could ask for. I wonder, then, if it's the mere characteristic of being a single parent that feels so overwhelming?

I will say this in praise of singledom: Every day is a girls day. Our room glows with shades of purple. We don't have to share the closet. Every morning, I savor the peaceful moments of solitude with my daughter. Every night, we say her prayers and lay her down to sleep before I go watch my guilty pleasures on television.

So here I am, at 12:17 a.m. I've got at least another hour in me, but as I write this I can hear Evie turning her dream-filled head from side to side as if to remind me that not only is she in the room, but breakfast is in five short hours.