Single mother of two little girls, here. Last weekend was my weekend off, I spent most of Saturday in bed by myself, save two hours at the hair salon, and it was divine! I should have been doing groceries, though, because those aren't nearly as fun to do at 5:45pm on Monday evening on the way home from school/daycare, with homework and the making of dinner and bathing still to be done before 8pm. Dating? I want to, dammit, try to, but can't seem to muster the emotional or physical energy to get anything off the ground.

I've never had to work through single parenting and honestly can't even imagine doing it myself, let alone trying to find time to date.  Just can't.  Hats off to you and the others that do it.  Working another person into the equation of life, even with co-parenting, is difficult under the best of circumstances.  My children are older, and should be, ostensibly, lower maintenance, or so I'm told.  My friends make fun of me when I say that I'm going home to turn off the phones and hide in bed.  (I guess this isn't the best way to promote myself on a dating site, but ah well.  It is what it is.)

My wife and I are both home with our one baby (I work from my home office these days), and I can't imagine being a single parent, much less having two little ones to mind.  Indeed, as much as I want a sibling for him, I'm having a hard time imagining how to pay enough attention to each of them (though obviously, many, many people do so successfully).

Dating IS a job. I think you just notice it less when you don't have anything else going on. I picture it like an unemployed person that lands a new job - for the first few months it's great to be actually doing something again and getting paid for it. Then after say, the first year, the tedium sets in and you wonder how you could have gotten so excited in the first place.

Just forget about forcing it. If you meet someone, and you click, so be it. It's organic, it's fun, it's natural. Further, I can't think of one person I know that's dating seriously that is happy all the time. More often than not when I phone them up, they're in a funk cos they just got in a fight with their significant other, or their significant other isn't acting the way they want them to, or some other random drama.

"Hell is other people."

- Sartre

My dream date involves a remote island and a jar of vaseline. And no one else.

I love sleeping.  Even with the nightmares, it's so much better than being awake.  I love the void that is the dreamless portion of sleep.  (Is sleep mostly dreamless, or does it seem that way only because of the failure of memory?)  Most of all I love the surrender to sleep, that moment (which can be terrifying if you're fully conscious of it) when you can no longer resist drifting off into the nothingness.

I think I will enjoy death.  I look forward to it.  What bed could be cozier than a deathbed?

Oh God, sleep. Is anything sweeter.

Don't know about the death though. I think with no painful life to contrast the slumberific awesomeness it might be in danger of losing its charm.

AHG, the attraction of having No. 2 is exactly that, that by school age they'll play with/terrorize each other rather than look to a parent for that (and as I grew up an only child, I know how boring being a singleton could be).  What scares my wife and me is the period when they are both toddlers (and we're sufficiently old that we're not in a position to wait till No. 1 is three or older).

Not to pry, but I had the impression your boys' Dad was in the picture.  Is he not able to take them for a weekend to give you a break, or is that topic simply not a place we should go?

"Counseling and meds."  The eternal chorus of the unimaginative, ignorant, and intolerant.