Dating for My Daughters

What a mistake, eh?
Funnily enough, over the last three years I have come to realize that it's a mistake not to think this way.

A few years ago my elementary school-aged daughters grounded me with the realization that I was modeling far too few visibly healthful adult relationships between the sexes, platonic or otherwise.  At the time I wasn't feeling categorically aligned with my Single status, and it did not occur to me that on a day-to-day basis my kids needed to fathom it too. Within a matter of months two of my long-time male friends came to town and spent time with us that year. After my best male friend came to stay with us for a few days, my daughters assessed it frankly and definitively: they announced that they didn't like having my boyfriend visit. I was puzzled; I didn't understand how this person they had known of all their lives had suddenly become a boyfriend out of sheer presence. But that was nothing compared to their sobering reasoning: he was always nice to me, so he must be my boyfriend. Wow. That spoke volumes, and about too many things.

Dating isn't an easy byproduct for a single mom who lives with her kids 24-7. The same is true of adult socializing in general. Add to the mix the balance of ensuring your kids see you in healthful adult relationships while also aiming to have adult relationships that don't necessarily or immediately involve them.....you can see where time-turning would come in handy. It's exhausting enough to make it through a week of general scheduling let alone tangling with the who/what/when/where and why of dating. But if I don't set that pace, whose lead will they follow when it comes to valuing their own future significant friendships? And if I don't show off some measure of pleasure and hint of hardship about how much work that takes, it could be a big mistake at the expense of their emotional security too. Of course, always-nice is a cocktail of its own challenging proportions. The mistake for mother and daughters would be to avoid more of what's behind the bar.