The Married Single Parent (1)

A female is often categorised as a girl or a woman; as old or young; married, single, divorced or widowed. It is expected that a woman will be one of these at one point or the other in her lifetime.  Categories in the marital status group are considered mutually exclusive; it is not expected that you will be in two categories at the same   time. You are either married or single. You can’t be married and single, right? Wrong! Times are changing and more and more people are finding themselves in this category these days for various reasons. The singleness in this case is different from the type we are used to where one parent is not in the picture because there are relational problems and so the parents are not married. In this case, the parents are in a marriage union but live apart with only one parent being with the children on a daily basis while the other parent only visits from time to time. Usually it is the mother who gets to stay with the children while the father visits.

Many situations may give birth to this scenario in a family. 90% of the time it is economy related. Failure to get jobs in the same town or its environs, transfer at work, husband working in a remote place without suitable schools for the children, better opportunities in a certain place for one spouse etc., may be some of the reasons many families live like this.  Whatever the reason may be, being a married single parent takes its toll on everyone in the family. If it can be helped, parents should stay together in the same place to raise their children. The economic gain may sometimes not be worth the separation. Being a married single parent has so many challenges.  Let’s consider some of them.

Sometimes the children in such homes end up being confused about the status of their parents’ marriage. With so many real single parents around and many divorce cases, children often think that their parents’ marriage has also joined the group. There is a case of a child who told his friends in school that his father ran away from home. The mother had a tough time explaining to the teachers that her husband had only gone to America in their bid to relocate the family. Some children develop separation anxiety with the parent often away from the home. They may start bedwetting after they had stopped or become very rebellious.

Some children grow up with a wrong sense of what marriage really is. They often believe that living separately is desirable ‘as far as daddy brings nice things when he visits’. My interactions with teenagers on the subject leave me thinking that we may have failed our children in showing them how God intended the family unit to operate. Some teens indicated that making money and growing their careers are more important than staying together as a family. The family they believe in not worth the sacrifice. Raising children goes beyond having money to do so.  It involves the emotions and the need to communicate to our children that they are worth more than the increase in pay-check that comes at the cost of leaving the family.

Children can be very manipulative when they want to be and the married single home is a very fertile place for this. They trade half-truths between mummy and daddy to get what they want. They play on daddy’s emotions when he is around and try emotional blackmail on mummy by calling her a difficult person. They wait for daddy’s visit to table the requests that mummy denied. They tell daddy how difficult mummy has been. These children can put up award winning performances both on the phone and in flesh.  At the end of it all, the children may develop a bond with one parent and not the other, creating room for future relational problems.                                                  

But problems with the children just form a tip of the iceberg. In fact, problems with the children may well be a symptom of problems with the parents that the children merely exploit. In some cases, the husband visits fortnightly and spends only one full day at home. It may be worse in other cases with the father being away for months or even years at a time. When he visits, everyone in the home wants some time with the visiting daddy and the fact that he is a husband is often forgotten. Romance and spending time together as a couple take the backseat and before they know what is happening, a huge gap has developed between them.

Trust often times becomes a big problem. Sex may become an incidental, leaving room for so many other complications. In extreme cases, a mistress may actually become a permanent fixture in the marriage. Men are not the only ones susceptible to this. Both men and women have been known to engage in sexual and/or emotional affairs in a bid to relieve the loneliness that comes with such an arrangement. There is no one for the woman to share her day with when she gets home and all is quiet after putting the children to bed. The husband may desire some home cooked meal and fall prey to someone waiting for a responsible man to come along, not minding that he is already married. All these problems occur in marriages with normal living conditions, but they become more likely in the married single home.                                          

Many different scenarios may be created based on this situation. However, the important thing to note is that if care is not taken, married single parents may find themselves emotionally bankrupt when or if they ever come to live as normal couples should. Many couples are getting into this arrangement believing it will only be for a while and it ends up becoming a norm for them. If you are not in it already, consider other options before creating two homes, and if it is your norm, pray that God intervenes. It seems to be the most effective reasonable weapon of the enemy to separate home. If he can’t get couples to divorce, he can get them to live apart while he works on destroying them and planting false views about marriage in the minds of the younger generation.    

We’ve discussed some problems this week; let’s talk about possible solutions next week.

Stay blessed and have a wonderful week.

I BI DEM