Dating Games : In the movies, single parents fall in love. In real life, it’ s tough for them to get out of the house, much less have a relationship.
Sex and the single parent? You bet.
They want it. They need it. They intend to find it. But the truth is that millions of America’s single parents can’t even engineer a carefree evening away from home, let alone a whole night out, a romantic weekend or a long-term relationship.
Their problem: how to deal with the children while trying to live a single life.
It’s a topic on which few courses are taught or books written, according to those who live the life and study the subject. And for the roughly 30% of American households consisting of single adults with kids (says the Census), it’s an unmapped road that can lead right off an emotional cliff.
Persuaded by sitcoms and films into thinking it should be possible (if not downright easy) to hunt for love--while simultaneously raising children, running a household and holding a full-time job--about 10 million Americans fumble their way each year through feelings of guilt, ambivalence and inadequacy as they juggle schedules and crises that drain the fun from a search for marriage and sexual fulfillment.
People were told they could have it all and they’ve found it’s not true, says Alexandra Penney, editor of Self magazine and author of “How To Make Love To a Man (Safely).”
“You can’t have it all. Something’s got to give. If it’s a choice between children, career and social life, the social life is first to suffer. Maybe that’s the way it has to be, if children are the first priority.”
But most people don’t make the choice easily.
As one Inglewood single father of two puts it: “I am so busy and so tired--and so utterly without options--that I can’t bother to think about the least important item on my priority list: my social life. My children come first, and they always will.”
This in no way prevents him from searching.
When he meets a woman he likes, he invites her out. Then he invites his daughters, ages 9 and 16. “The 16-year-old usually declines. The 9-year-old always says yes.”
Sure, it puts a crimp on conversation and on the places the trio can go, he admits. “A typical date includes dinner somewhere like Denny’s and a G-rated film.”
John (who like others in this story asked that his name not be used), says he doesn’t want his daughters to feel “excluded” from any part of his life. He has invented “rules” to protect them from emotional grief when he dates, he says, but has no way of checking the effectiveness.
His most recent relationship lasted six months. “I never slept anywhere but home,” the 39-year-old technical writer says, proudly. “I am there mornings to fix breakfast, feed the rabbit and have quality time with my kids.”
A typical evening: “When we come home from a date, my older daughter is watching TV in her room. My youngest gets ready for bed, as does my girlfriend. She wears proper flannel PJs and climbs into a sleeping bag on the couch. When the kids are asleep, she comes into my bed. She gets up early and leaves--or goes out on the sofa again.”
John says he ended the relationship because his 9-year-old seemed troubled: she started asking to sleep in her father’s bed and offered the girlfriend her own bed. Also, his ex-wife was angry about his new girlfriend and refused to send child support. And his girlfriend, who’d never been married, said she wanted children of her own. “I would not want to have another baby,” John says.
Home Alone
Some parents go to opposite extremes.
One mother routinely leaves her 15-year-old son home alone all night in their West Los Angeles apartment. She did not date for years while the boy was growing up, she says. Now she’s trying to find happiness with a man she met through Parents Without Partners.
Because the man has sole custody of two girls under 10, who can’t be left alone, and her son is “a good boy who doesn’t get into trouble,” the mother feels she’s made an acceptable choice.
“My son watches TV in his room and probably doesn’t even know I’m gone all night,” says the bank administrator. She carries overnight things in her attache case, “so if my son sees me, he thinks I’m going to or coming from work.”
What if he awakens and looks for her? “I haven’t dealt with that. If there was an emergency, he could call one of our neighbors.”
Kids Are No Fools
Dr. Steven S. Schenkel, a Los Angeles psychiatrist, says he doubts most children are fooled by the games single parents play.
“Children pick up on what you’re doing, even if you don’t tell them. The more straightforward a parent is, the more smoothly things turn out. Parents should convey that they must go away sometimes to have fun. But they should not give a child too much detail.”
Schenkel and others familiar with the lives of single parents, say their problems are vast and complex--and differ widely, depending on the age of the children, the family’s economic and social bracket, and the psychological damage caused by divorce or the death of the missing parent.
A major worry these days is molestation, Schenkel says. “Some mothers won’t even allow boyfriends in the house or won’t date at all for fear that their children might be at some risk.”
Another is the fear that the child will feel threatened by the new man or woman on the scene. “Some parents blow it out of proportion, but others have cause to worry.”
In a recent case, Schenkel says, a boy of 13 “declared guerrilla warfare” on the new man his mother was dating. “He would hide the man’s belongings, take money from his wallet, then he became a tagger in Beverly Hills until he was caught doing graffiti by the police.”
The mother didn’t know whose side to take, he says. She wanted to be loyal and reassuring to her son even as his behavior got worse. But she would not let her boyfriend reprimand or discipline him.
So Many Questions . . .
Single-parent readers are full of questions about how to conduct their lives, says Self magazine’s Penney.
“Do you whirl a number of dates by your child? Do you leave children at friends’ homes so you can have an overnight? If you don’t have money for sitters, do you bring your child along on some dates?” she says.
Other biggies: When to introduce your child to your date; what to do if your child doesn’t like the person you date--or, worse yet, that person’s children; how to ease the child’s fear of taking a back seat to the new date--or the child’s desire to help you find a replacement for the missing parent.
. . . So Few Answers
With no clear answers, everyone muddles through: “If my daughter doesn’t like the children of the woman I date, then I stop seeing the woman,,” says Bob Basile, 40, whose wife died when his daughter was 5 months old. She is now 11, and “the most important thing in my life,” says Basile, a legal secretary and president of the Los Angeles chapter of Parents Without Partners.
He has a beeper and a car phone to which only his daughter has the numbers. If a woman stays overnight, he doesn’t hide her from his daughter. He encourages his child to tell him which dates she likes. “The trouble is, she likes them all; she gets attached really quick. Sometimes, if we’re out together, she’ll take my date’s hand and my hand and put them both together.”
People with enough money to hire sitters on a regular basis would seem ahead of the game. Not really, says a recently divorced Reseda mother of a boy, 8, and a girl, 7.
“First, I have to drive my kids to pick up the sitter and back home. She’s a high school girl, who gets $4 an hour. When I come home from my date, the kids are asleep. I can ask my date to take the sitter home--which I hate to do--or I have to wake both kids, take them with me, then put them to bed again.”
No Time for Dating
Cheryl, a bookkeeper in Oceanside, has put dating on hold. She has a 3-year-old son with whom she’d rather spend every spare minute. A typical day: “Up at 6 a.m., play with baby, dress baby, feed baby, dress myself, take baby to day care, be at work by 8:30 a.m., leave work in time to pick up baby by 5:30 p.m., stop at market, feed baby, bathe baby for one hour (he loves it), play with baby, read to baby. Sleep.”
Cheryl says if she stays up late, she has no energy the next morning. “My son wakes early, filled with energy. I like to be in tune with him.”
Shoshana Alexander, a Minneapolis writer and single parent of a 4-year-old, says she’s encountered so many logistic and philosophical problems with dating that she set out to write a book on the subject.
“It was so hard for me to work full time, try to date and raise a child alone. I thought there must be ways others have found to make this life possible. I decided to find out what they are and write about them, so people would know what to do.”
But her book, “In Praise of Single Parents,” to be published in February, offers no solutions. Instead, it will be a “book of support, solace and possibilities. After interviewing hundreds of people on this subject,” she says, “I discovered no one has any answers. It is a dilemma of the heart.”