Adventures in Single Parenting

Denisa and Daniela are away at a youth conference for the first part of this week, which leaves me and MC holding the fort down at home. I didn’t think this would be too terribly difficult. MC is eleven now, after all, and she’s home by herself often anyway. True, she has swimming lessons each day that I’d have to make sure to get her to, but really. How hard could this be?

Yesterday started off smoothly enough. I was teaching a four hour session to upcoming students all on the business of writing, and MC came along with me, sitting patiently in a corner working on her own stuff and watching Netflix. She walked down the street to her swim lesson and came back with no hiccups at all. I then drove her home so she could keep an eye on Ferris the rest of the day. Easy peasy.

She went to take him for a walk while I was grabbing some lunch, and while I was eating, it started to really pour outside, so I took the car and went and picked the two of them up. Once I dropped them back off at home, I headed back to work. On the way, I was surprised by just how hard it was raining. Tons of standing water on the road, and enough rain coming down to make it hard to see at times even with the wipers going full blast.

I worked for the next few hours in peace as it continued to come down outside. My phone rang, but it was a California number, so I assumed it was spam. I checked to see if it left a message, and I was surprised that it had. When I listened to it, it was MC (calling from Alexa), frantic because an alarm was going off in the basement. She was convinced it was a smoke detector, and she’s always been very worried about house fires, so she was naturally panicked.

I called her right back and headed home as I did. As soon as I heard the alarm, I knew what it was: the sump pump was clogged in the basement. That happens sometimes when it rains too much all at once. So there was likely some standing water down there, but nothing I was too worried about. I tried to reassure MC, ending up telling her to just close the door to the basement and go to a different part of the house where she couldn’t hear the alarm. She was in tears.

When I got home, I unclogged the sump pump and then went to work on calming my daughter down. It took about a half hour to get things smoothed out. Definitely more of an adventure than I was anticipating, and it made me realize just how difficult it would be/is for parents trying to get everything done between running a job, a house, and a family all on their own.

She’s back at swim lessons today, and I’ll be bringing her home again soon. Thankfully, no rain in the forecast today, so things should be smoother sailing. Denisa’s back tomorrow night, so wish us luck until then. 🙂