AUSTRALIAN AUTHOR | Free Book | 'Clown Club: Chapter 3' by D. M. Wright
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VOLUME 1
CHAPTER 3. >>
I. & II.
Dad and I hadn’t quite figured each other out.
More or less, I grew up in a single-mum household.
Sure, Dad existed. Technically. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t missing or in prison. Nor one of those blokes who vanished to Bali and reappeared fifteen years later with a ponytail and conspiracies about cryptocurrency. He got every second weekend. A fraction of the school holidays. The occasional phone call.
If fatherhood were measured in custody percentages, he was operating on a sub-basic subscription package at ten times the price.
Looking back now, I probably should’ve seen the problem earlier.
Not my problem.
The bigger one.
Because when you’re a kid, your household feels normal no matter how strange it actually is. Fish don’t sit around discussing water quality. They just swim in it. Likewise, kids don’t conduct sociological audits on their living arrangements. They just assume everyone else’s life works the same way theirs does, or the grass is always greener on the other side of the fishbowl.
It wasn’t until I got older that I discovered there were entire armies of researchers, academics and government departments whose full-time jobs amounted to studying kids like me.
And, to my surprise, quite a few of them had reached a conclusion that would’ve earned them a swift unfriending from mums on Facebook.
See; the popular story is that all family structures are basically interchangeable. Swap out this piece, remove that piece, rearrange the furniture and everything balances itself out.
Yet reality appears less enthusiastic about participating in that particular fantasy.
Kids raised primarily by single mothers suffer. Statistically, they don’t suffer from a lack of love – though there are certainly those cases – but from a lack of resources.
And, whether me or my parents wanted to admit it, I was a walking case study.
Mum loved me. The woman would’ve fought a crocodile in a Coles carpark if she thought it’d improve my school grades.
The problem was that she was asked to do the job of two people with the time, money and energy of one.
That’s the part everybody likes skipping over.
Single mums don’t wake up every morning and decide to provide fewer resources than a dual-parent household.
Maths simply beats them over the head with a shovel.
One income is expected to stretch where two incomes are needed.
One set of hands is expected to manage a workload biology decided was for two adults.
One person is somehow expected to be a breadwinner, caregiver, chauffeur, disciplinarian, counsellor, homework supervisor, nurse, referee and emotional support animal all in one.
Eventually, something gives.
Usually not because of incompetence.
Usually because there are only twenty-four hours in a day.
The kid absorbs whatever strain leaks through the cracks.
Maybe the household has fewer books.
Maybe there’re fewer extracurricular activities.
Maybe there isn’t enough spare cash for tutoring.
Maybe they’re simply too exhausted after work to spend two extra hours helping with algebra and persuasive essays.
None of those disadvantages sound particularly dramatic viewed in isolation.
The problem is that they stack.
They stack on top of other stacks.
And before anybody notices, their sons have fallen behind though everybody involved was trying their best.
But resources aren’t the only thing that end up stretched thin.
Kids don’t just absorb financial strain.
They also absorb emotional strain.
III.
That’s another finding which keeps turning up whenever researchers start poking around households like mine.
The stereotype is that kids from unstable environments become little rebels.
Delinquents.
Troublemakers.
Future stars of Random Breath Test and the Magistrates’ Courts.
But that’s not actually the pattern seen in a lot of boys raised primarily by single mothers.
Plenty of us don’t act out.
Instead, we shut down.
We internalise.
We become emotional hoarders.
Every anxiety gets dragged inside and stacked on top of the next one.
Every worry goes into storage.
Every fear gets tucked away where nobody else can see it.
Looking back, that was me to a T.
I wasn’t some rebellious little delinquent setting fire to wheelie bins and terrorising pensioners.
I was nervous.
Constantly nervous.
Nervous about making mistakes.
Nervous about disappointing Mum.
Nervous about embarrassing myself.
Nervous about things worth worrying about.
Nervous about things that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
And when you’re growing up around financial stress, time stress and parental exhaustion, you become surprisingly good at spotting cracks.
A sigh that lasts a little too long.
A worried look while checking the banking app.
A bill left on the kitchen bench.
An exhausted collapse onto the couch after work.
Kids notice.
They always notice.
And without another adult to absorb part of that weight, they often start carrying some of it themselves.
Not because they’re asked to.
All because they love their parent.
But children make terrible packhorses.
Which, undoubtedly, explains why, by the age of fifteen, I had become a skinny little anxiety goblin.
Quiet as fuck.
Nervous about everything.
And absolutely terrified of looking stupid.
Aaaaand school wasn’t helping.
IV.
That’s another uncomfortable finding buried inside all the statistics.
When schools start disciplining kids from single-mum households at higher rates than their classmates, most people automatically picture little arsonists, future prison inmates and twelve-year-olds hurling chairs through windows.
The reality is considerably less exciting.
Most of us weren’t getting suspended for turning the quadrangle into a warzone.
We were getting pinged for administration.
Paperwork.
Attendance.
Uniform violations.
Homework.
Being late.
Being absent.
Forgetting things.
The sorts of offences that sound insignificant until they start accumulating like unpaid parking fines.
That’s because schools often punish the symptoms while remaining largely blind to the machinery producing them.
A single parent working irregular shifts doesn’t just bring home less income.
They bring home less time.
Less supervision.
Less energy.
Less capacity to monitor every moving part involved in raising a kid.
School uniforms need washing.
Homework needs checking.
Lunches need packing.
Alarms need setting.
Transport needs organising.
Someone has to remember it all.
And when one person is carrying every responsibility inside a household, things occasionally fall through the cracks.
The school doesn’t record any of that.
The school records a late arrival.
An incomplete assignment.
A missing hat.
An unexplained absence.
The paperwork measures the outcome rather than the cause.
There was no way in hell this little anxiety goblin was going to ever become some criminal mastermind operating a black-market op-shop empire from Year Nine.
I could never have been suspended for fighting.
I’d never have been suspended for vandalising a classroom.
I’d never be the one organising street gang riots behind the bike sheds.
I was simply the sort of boy schools are remarkably good at misunderstanding.
V.
The frustrating part is that none of this is particularly mysterious.
By the time researchers finish gathering all their data, running their analyses and producing reports thick enough to stun a charging water buffalo, they tend to arrive at the same conclusion.
The problem isn’t single mothers.
The problem is unsupported single mothers.
That’s a very different conversation.
Because the data doesn’t suggest kids from single-mum households are doomed.
It suggests they’re overloaded.
Mum was overloaded.
I was overloaded.
The household itself was overloaded.
And when a structure is carrying more weight than it was designed for, eventually somebody starts sagging in the middle.
Usually the kid.
Schools often misunderstand this.
They see the symptoms.
The poor test results.
The absent homework.
The late arrival.
The wandering attention span.
The anxiety.
The withdrawal.
What they don’t always see is the machinery underneath producing those outcomes.
They see smoke and bitch about the fire alarm.
What boys like me needed wasn’t more punishment.
We needed reinforcement.
More support.
More time.
More mentoring.
More adults capable of sharing the load.
A boy simply needs more adults in his corner.
Sometimes, those adults are his teachers.
Sometimes, those adults are his coaches.
Sometimes, they’re his neighbours, his grandparents and even the parents of his mates.
And sometimes, if the courts allow it, mentoring comes from his father.
Dad stepped back to admire his work.
Standing there in his oversized clown shirt in the middle of the pub carpark, I started scanning the strangers around us.
One glance.
Then another.
Dad caught me:
“Don’t look at them.”
My eyes wandered anyway.
He put both hands to my shoulders.
“Look at me.”
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