Riding Solo on the Parenting Rollercoaster with a Teen in Tow

Ever found yourself thrown into the deep end of parenting duties? Well, I'm Terrance, and I've lived to tell the tale! Join me as I recount the unexpected adventure of solo parenting my teenage daughter while my wife was away. From haircare hurdles to laundry lessons and the culinary creativity of quick-fix meals, I've navigated the full gamut of household chores with a mixture of humor, desperation, and unexpected delight. Discover how a hair doll head became my unlikely ally and why peanut butter and jelly can be a gourmet meal in the eyes of a hungry teenager.

Wrapping up this heartwarming episode, I reflect on the strength of family bonds and the beauty of keeping connected—even through the simplest of acts, like making lunch. Whether you're a single parent by chance or by design, this conversation is a blend of relatable anecdotes, practical tips, and a warm invitation to share your own stories. So, come laugh, learn, and maybe shed a tear or two as we celebrate the often-overlooked joys of stepping up to the plate when it's your turn to hold down the fort.

Chapters

• 0:00 Balancing Responsibilities During Spouse's Absence
• 8:32 Single Parenting Survival Guide
• 20:46 Stay Connected With Lunch With Sandy

Transcript

Announcer: 0:00

In a relationship, when is honesty not the best policy? How do you balance what you want versus what you need, and is there something you need to say to your spouse but can't find the right way to say it? If so, then you're in the right place. This is the Lunch with Sandy podcast. With nearly 20 years of marriage under their belts, Terrance and Sandy Jackson discuss a range of topics, provide valuable insights on relationships and talk about the conversations married couples need to have. Terrance and Sandy Jackson discuss a range of topics, provide valuable insights on relationships and talk about the conversations married couples need to have. So what does lunch have to do with all of this? Well, it's a metaphor for how these conversations originally started. Speaking of conversations, let's get one going.

Terrance: 0:40

Here's your hosts, terrence and Sandy. Welcome to the first solo episode of the Lunch with Sandy podcast, where I will speak on topics and provide the wisdom and guidance you can only get from having the experiences I have had. I'm Terrence. Today I will be helping those of you out there who may be in the situation that I am in today and that is flying solo as a parent of a teenage daughter while my wife is away. But before we dive into that, please remember to follow the Lunch With Sandy podcast on your favorite podcasting app. Also, be sure to follow the show on all social media at Lunch With Sandy. Now let's talk about why I am solo today.

Terrance: 1:25

So I am the father of three daughters. My oldest daughter is a traveling nurse and for the past year she's been on a contract out in California Christmas and she says that you know she's been spending a lot of money on Uber while she's out there and she believes that it'll be much cheaper that if she just ships her car out there and so when her contract is up she can just drive home. So that time has come and my wife has decided and it's a good idea that she fly out, meet my daughter in the Vegas area and then they can drive back across country. So again she's in California. We live on the East Coast between Massachusetts and Connecticut, and that drive would be much better if you had more than one person doing it. And at the same time they're going to stop, do some hiking, see some sights and eventually make their way back home.

Terrance: 2:31

Now, bringing you all back to where I am Again. I have three daughters. Two of them are out of the house, but I have a 14-year-old who is actually at home. I don't know if any of you have a 14-year-old, but you would think that at that age, there's not much that you have to do for them or provide for them. However, you'd be greatly mistaken. They don't make 14-year-olds like they used to, and I love my daughter. So I say that with a bit of tongue in cheek, but the short of it is my wife is traveling across the country with my oldest daughter. I'm home with my youngest daughter and the dog, and the question becomes how will I survive this time alone with a 14-year-old?

Terrance: 3:27

Well, let me provide you with some insight into my strategy. So the first thing that I looked at was you know me and my wife. We do a good job of splitting up what we need to do from a day-to-day basis to make sure that my youngest daughter has everything she needs and is prepared for whatever she needs to be prepared for. So, right off the bat, what I did was I started thinking about those areas that my wife normally actually takes care of, and then I had to think about how I was going to try to bridge the gap, and of course, that takes planning. It's not like you can just wait until that time comes and then say, up now I need to start doing all this stuff. So as I looked at the day-to-day preparation and the day-to-day things that we actually worked on, I knew that there were pretty much three areas that my wife took care on a regular basis that I was going to have to take care of for my daughters for just about a week. It was five days, yeah, just about five days. So the three most impactful areas that were going to be affected by this I guess I would call it gap or this time away from my wife were hair, laundry I guess you can classify that as clothes and food, and I would actually say the priority for those things actually were in that order, and really, from the food aspect, that's not really that big of a deal, because I find myself cooking for my daughter on many nights when she doesn't want to have what my wife has prepared for dinner anyway, and I've gotten to the habit of making her lunch dinner anyway and I've gotten to the habit of making her lunch. Part of it was in preparation for fitting some of the extra things that I needed to do in my actual schedule, but at the same time, after doing it a couple of times, I realized that that was something that I really enjoyed doing, and that is making lunch for my actual daughter.

Terrance: 5:39

Now let's get to the first and the most impactful piece, or the most impactful activity that I had to prepare myself for when it came to taking care of my daughter. Right, and it's a big one, it's the hair. If you're in this situation, there are some tasks that your daughters or your kids, your sons or whatever I'm going to stick to daughters, because that's the situation that I'm in there's some tasks that they should be doing on a regular basis, such as washing their hair, conditioning it, brushing it. Those things they should be doing on their own and they should be doing them pretty frequently, and if they're not, you're going to find yourself in a situation where it's going to be a lot more difficult for you to actually be able to tackle that. So let me give you a little tip and this is something that I learned from experience.

Terrance: 6:30

Before you're in this situation, or if you know you're going to be in a situation where you got to pick up the slack and your wife is not going to be around and your girlfriend is not going to be around, find out if your child knows what products are used and if they can actually locate them, or if you actually even have them. And let me explain why I say this. I was under the impression that my daughter knew what my wife used in her hair. Again, she's 14. Lo and behold, she couldn't tell me what was used in her actual hair. So I had to reach out to my wife and say hey, listen, there's this basket, there's a ton of stuff in this basket. Does all this stuff go in her hair? There's three brushes, there's like four combs. My daughter couldn't tell me any of the information that was necessary to actually do her hair.

Terrance: 7:29

Now let's get to the styling portion. Right, there was a point in my daughter's life where I can slap her hair into a ponytail, pigtails on the side or even braid it down the middle and she'd be good. She's 14. That stuff doesn't work anymore. So I would suggest, if there's some simple hairstyles that you know that you can pull off and your daughter is accepting of those hairstyles, practice, because that's going to make your situation much easier when it comes to getting her hair done and getting her out of the house on time. Again, this is going on during the school year, so it's not like it's summertime where you know she's just going to go out and no one's really going to see her. She got to look presentable when she goes to school. So, again, if you have some simple hairstyles you can pull off and your daughter doesn't mind, cool, practice. For those cases where those simple hairstyles will not cut it, like my case with my daughter, let me tell you what you do.

Terrance: 8:32

Well, let me tell you what I did. My daughter is in this phase where she will only have one of three hairstyles the French braid, the Dutch braid and this balloon braid, which I had never seen before, but it looks kind of cool. But my skills in all of those areas were extremely lacking and my daughter has long hair Thick I don't want to say thick, but it's. It's thicker hair, so if it's not maintained it gets frizzy and it will actually kind of stand out. So what I did was and what I would suggest is prior to my wife leaving, I had her go through the preparation and what she did to get the actual hairstyle that my daughter liked. I sat there, I watched her, she went over it and I had in my mind the steps that were necessary. What I also did was I purchased one of those hair doll heads from Amazon and if you don't know what those hair doll heads are, they're basically styling dolls where you can pick the type of hair and they'll ship it to you and you can use that to practice the actual hairstyle on. Now I bought the doll head. It's a creepy looking doll head. I tried to practice on it a little, but after seeing my wife do what she did and practicing just a little bit, I pretty much knew I could actually pull off the style by just undoing one braid at a time and then replicating what was on the other side. So that's what I did. It worked out pretty well.

Terrance: 10:28

Now let's get into the laundry. For me, the process of doing laundry is not new. I've been doing my own laundry for a very, very long time, partly because when my wife used to do it, something always happened to my clothes. Now, that may have been intentional, but we're not gonna get into that right now. When it comes to laundry, particularly for your kids, know where they keep their laundry. I say that speaking from experience. We have a laundry room. In the laundry room there are baskets for different types of actual articles of clothing or types of laundry that need to be done. None of my daughter's clothes were in the laundry room or in any of those baskets. So make sure you know where their actual dirty clothes are or where they keep their laundry.

Terrance: 11:17

Second tip too before you get into the process of doing laundry or just in general, ask if they actually have clean clothes. Once again, I'm trying to make sure that you're prepared, because what will happen is this it will be the morning, it'll be 20, 30 minutes before they have to go to school and they'll come down and say I don't have any clothes. That's not leaving you any time to actually wash those clothes. So be prepared, ask them if they have to clean clothes and know where the actual laundry is. One other tip too If you're not the person who normally does the laundry, be sure to ask your significant other what their process is and how they actually separate the clothes. My daughter again she's 14. She has no clue how any of this stuff is separated. And again, I wash my own laundry. I have my process. My wife doesn't wash my daughter's clothes or her clothes the same way I do. My daughter would just take everything and just actually lump it all together and throw it in there. You can do that, but then you may end up ruining her favorite sweatshirt or whatever, and then she'll say that's all she has to wear and won't want to go to school. So keep that in mind.

Terrance: 12:41

Now let's get into the meals. You're going to have to have something in your arsenal that you can make, so you're not ordering out every day. You can order out every day, but we're talking about being prepared and trying to make sure that your significant other understands that if there's something that is going to take them away from the home for a while, you got this. There are some real easy foods that you should be able to make that most kids at that age are going to love or find acceptable. Number one on the list and I don't know many kids that don't like this, regardless of age. Hell, I still like it, and I'm much older than 14.

Terrance: 13:28

And that's peanut butter and jelly. If your child has a peanut butter allergy then it's a different story. But peanut butter and jelly is a staple and it's easy to make. You got bread, you got peanut butter and you got a butter knife. Slap it together. But keep this in mind there is a proper way to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You spread the jelly on one side of the bread and the peanut butter on the other side of the bread and then you put the two pieces together. That is the proper way to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Terrance: 14:02

So number one peanut butter and jelly. Number two ramen noodles. I don't know if you heard, but ramen noodles is one of the easiest things to make in the world, not the healthiest, but man do. They taste good and if you can boil water, you can easily make ramen noodles. And I'm going to tell you how you can step your game up. Take some hot dogs, boil them. After you make the ramen noodles, you cut the hot dogs up, you put them in the ramen noodles and now you got noodles and for those that don't know, noodles is just another term, a shortened term for ghetto noodles. That coin was first termed by my man, prince Hoff. Shout out to Prince making those noodles.

Terrance: 14:46

Now there are two other things that you should be able to pull off from a food perspective without any issues. The first is mac and cheese. Mac and cheese is one of the easiest things to make. Again, if you can boil water, you should be able to make mac and cheese, and now and now they even have mac and cheese that you can make in a microwavable cup. It's simple you pull the top off. There's a little line where you pour the water into Up to the line, put it in the microwave for three minutes. Once it comes out, mix the stuff in, stir it up. Important piece of information you gotta make sure you put water in there. I remember when my middle daughter was around 16, 17,. She decided she was going to make some mac and cheese in the microwave oven. She didn't put any water in there. It stunk the house up for days. So, mac and cheese if you're going to go microwavable, put the water in there up to the line.

Terrance: 15:46

Now, another dish and this is the last dish I'll mention from a food perspective that you really should have in your arsenal is rice, and there's a couple ways to make rice. But rice is very simple to make. If you've got a rice cooker, extremely easy. But even if you don't have a rice cooker, if you can boil some water and you have a little attention to detail, you can make some rice. And here's why rice is something you really should have in your arsenal. You can take that rice and you can scramble up some eggs, mix some eggs into it Phenomenal I know some people might not be on board with that, but it's basically a form of, you know, fried rice taking the eggs, putting it in there, put some vegetables on. You can have rice with vegetables. There's all kinds of things that you can do if you can actually pull off boiling or making some actual rice.

Terrance: 16:42

Now we talked about the daily activities and those things that you probably, or those things that I had to take into account to prepare for my wife being away. But there's something else that you know we have to cover. You can't overlook the fact, when you're planning, that you're going to be the sole support for your daughter while the other parent is away. Remember, your daughter's support system is going to be cut in half because one of you are not going to be there, and in this case it's my wife who wasn't there. So you want to make sure that she's comfortable coming to you with her questions and concerns. Now, normally, there's going to be some things that she would normally go to her mom about, and there's going to be some things that she would normally would go to you about, would normally go to her mom about, and there's going to be some things that she normally would go to you about. But in this situation she's not going to actually have that option. So just make sure that you know, you make sure she feels comfortable coming to you. And here's another tip Family can be a huge addition to your support system. While your significant other is away, be sure to reach out and ask them for any assistance, because they're going to be more than willing to actually help. And this is where I want to give a shout out to my sister-in-law, danielle.

Terrance: 18:01

So, while Sandy was away, ayla had just made the track team, and so she had track practice after school and I had a board meeting that I actually had to attend to and in. Well, there were two things. One, when my wife flew out to Vegas while she was, her flight was scheduled to go out. I was in DC. My flight was scheduled to come in. Many times, coming back from DC, my flight is always late and so we wouldn't have been able to pick Ayla up for um to pick Ayla up from her practice, but Danielle stepped up, not only for that particular day while I was flying back from DC, but also I had a board meeting later on in the week that Ayla was going to be home for a short period of time and Danielle offered to be there to actually not only pick her up but provide support for her. So shout out to Danielle Again her up, but provide support for her. So shout out to Danielle Again take advantage of friends and families who are willing to actually help you out.

Terrance: 18:59

Now I talked about being solo for a while, and being solo can be challenging when you're used to having a partner to help you through getting all the things you need to get done completed. But try to look at that solo time with your child as an opportunity. Find opportunities to bond with your daughter when you can do that, it makes for a great experience. Look at it as a mini vacation or staycation with just the two of you. It'll do a couple of things if you can find ways to actually entertain them. One, it keeps their mind off them possibly missing the other parent, but, more importantly, it gives you the opportunity to build lasting memories. Opportunity to build lasting memories. So if it's playing a board game, going out for pizza or going out to do something that you normally wouldn't do, just make it so that their time is actually enjoyable and that will have a lasting impression.

Terrance: 20:04

So let's wrap this up when it comes to being a solo parent for any specific period of time, there's going to be some challenges that are going to come while you're holding down the fort, when whoever it is is away, but when you have a plan that will help you get through it, it makes it so much easier. Also, remember to take advantage of the opportunity to bond and build memories with your kid. That will have a lasting impact, as I just stated. And another thing you're not alone. Reach out to friends and family and take advantage of that support system that you have when you actually need it. Thank you for joining us on the Lunch with Sandy podcast. Please be sure to follow us and leave feedback on your favorite podcasting app, as well as social media, at Lunch with Sandy.

Announcer: 20:55

Until next time, stay well, that's it for this week's episode of the Lunch with Sandy podcast. Thanks for listening. We'd love to hear your feedback and comments on Instagram, tiktok and Twitter at Lunch with Sandy, and be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to rate and review us. Thanks again for listening to the Lunch with Sandy podcast.