Midlife Meditation

For a single parent with a low income, summer is hell. My first stint of single parenting was from 1995-96. I was a rural pastor, on minimum salary, with very few resources to drawn on, and my children were very small: 2 and 5 at the beginning of the divorce, 4 and 7 by the time I remarried almost two years later. During the school year, they were with me weekends and holidays. During the summer, I alternated entire weeks. Early on, I discovered a painful reality: on my parenting weeks, I had no freedom. I could only visit people who enjoyed children. I had to do all my office work from home. And I could forget about exercising. They were just too small to be by themselves, and I didn't know my new congregation well enough to ask for babysitting help. Fortunately, rural ministers enjoy far greater flexibility than practitioners of almost any other trade or profession I'm aware of. I survived my first summer largely unscathed, and by the second, I had gained enough experie...

  I called it my single parenting midterm: leave after church on a March Sunday in 1996, drive halfway, spend the night in a hotel, then drive the rest of the way the next day to camp in the Disneyland campground. The following day--Tuesday--we'd have early admission at the park by virtue of staying at an official Disney facility. We'd make the most of it, riding everything appropriate to two small children and their still divorce-shell-shocked father (the papers had only been signed six months earlier), until the park closed at dusk. The following day, we'd drive to Yosemite National Park, spend the night in a cabin, then tour the park for a day. The day after that, we'd drive all the way home. Along the way, we ate many of our meals out of a cooler. This was Spring Break on the cheap. And I mostly pulled it off. It was a simpler time in many ways. Sean and Sarah were 3 and 6, respectively. Their main concern in the car was who got to ride in the front seat next to...