There have been some thoughts dominating my mind recently and I need to get them out on paper.

The main thought that constantly appears: if I feel like a single parent, should I just BE a single parent? For all intents and purposes, I am a single parent. I do 99% of the parenting. My SO shows up when he can/when he feels like it and sometimes will redeem himself by giving the baby a bath or sitting next to Rokia in bed and having a sweet conversation with her. But those moments are few and far between.

On school days, I wake up at around 5:30 because Amina want to eat, at 6:20 I get Rokia up and get her ready for school. Recently, my SO is even slacking on driving her to/from school so I’ve been giving the maid taxi money to take Rokia to school and back. It’s less of a hassle than me getting Amina in the car seat and in the car. Then I spend the whole day taking care of Amina, doing some chores (luckily we have a maid so I don’t do too much there), playing with Rokia while taking care of Amina in the afternoon. I try to spend some time everyday with Rokia working on letters and numbers in French and English. Then I make dinner (with Amina in a baby carrier on my chest), my SO usually doesn’t make it home for dinner, and then I help Rokia get ready for bed, put Amina to sleep, and then fall asleep myself because I’m exhausted at that point.

Like I said in my last blog, this is not about getting my SO to change his behavior. I know that I cannot force him to change and I no longer want to waste my energy on that because it’s making me miserable. This, of course, is easier said than done but I’m trying.

So, if I’m doing all of the parenting, why not just be a single parent? First of all, I would miss him. He's brought me a lot of pain in recent times but he also has brought me great joy and I love him with all my heart.
Of course, there are some ways in which he contributes to the household that I would miss if we were separated. He brings take-out for dinner when I am too lazy to cook. He does some of our errands like paying for wifi and electricity. He’ll pick up things from the store when I ask him to. But even with these things, he can’t always be counted on. He’ll often be so late with dinner than I have to give Rokia top ramen since it’s past her bedtime. Twice he procrastinated paying for our electricity (it’s prepaid here) and we ran out of credit and had to go spend the night in a hotel because it was too hot to sleep without a fan or A/C.

I worry about how to do some of those things if he wasn’t living with us, but I’d figure it out. I worry more about feeling afraid and alone. Afraid because I am pretty freaked out to be living alone here. I am home alone tonight because he got a translation job in the village and it’s midnight and I still can’t sleep because every little noise freaks me out. It scares me to be a foreign woman living alone with 2 children.

And then I worry about my emotional state living alone. Yes, he frustrates me, but he is still my person. And if he weren’t here, I’d have nobody. I have no friends here, just some work acquaintances. And I have just you guys and my family to talk to from afar. But with my family, I can’t even speak honestly because they already worry about me and I don’t want to make it worse. I have a feeling if I told my mom that I was living alone here, she’d insist on my coming home.

In my last post, I talked about how we wouldn’t separate here because than I am stuck in Mali because I don’t want to raise our girls away from their dad. But than I started to think, if my life now is making me this miserable, I need to find a solution. And on New Years Eve, I talked to my SO about the possibility of us separating for some time if things didn’t improve but continuing with the visa process together anyway. I don’t know exactly how that would look- would he move out just for a few months and then, hopefully, get his act together and come back? Or would he move out until the visa was approved (that could be around 10 months to a year) and then we move to the States together and try to start fresh? Or is this plan just plain stupid?

I don’t want to make any hasty decisions so I’m not doing anything right away except for thinking about it.

Realizing that my life looks really pitiful from the outside perspective.