What is this phenomenon where one parent can fly solo while the other is away? You tap into auto-pilot mode with relative ease. To survive, you might dumb the whole routine down a notch or two (or five), depending on how many kids you have. You serve breakfast for dinner one night, nachos another, and take them out to a restaurant. The house may be more unkempt than usual, and the bathtub might be dry as a bone. You lie to yourself about how easy it is, and how you could do this indefinitely. But the minute that spouse returns, your system undergoes a series of shut-downs only akin to a security breach at the White House. You may still be there in body, but you cannot be reached. As you eke out a break to regroup (and maybe use the potty sans kids in the bathroom), you tell yourself that it wasn't half bad. In fact, it was pretty easy and if you had to, you could do it all over again tomorrow. The truth is, it can seem easier to parent solo because you are acting on behalf of only one person (yourself), instead of two.
What makes parenting so extra-challenging is that you NEVER do it in a vacuum. Instead, parenting almost always takes place in front of a huge mirror. Of course, even the most renegade among us check our own reflection occasionally. But when we parent with a partner (that huge mirror I just referred to), everything we do is a little harder because we aren't just trying to please ourselves. We have the dreams and goals of another parent to respect. And those dreams and goals are what our partners want for their children. The only way to win here is to respect, share, listen, repeat (and don't forget to breathe).
