That’s a good question for a Monday morning isn’t it? How exactly do you know if you’ve made the right decision about something?

Well, maybe you don’t.

But maybe that’s okay.

I went and spent the night at the seaside last week, because I fancied a paddle. I did actually paddle too, even though it was really bloody freezing. I did a ten minute Twitter poll and surprise surprise, 95% of people were in favour of the February paddle. I feel a bit sad really for the 5% who said no because seriously, how can you go to the beach and not want to take your tights off and get your feet wet?

Making a decision isn’t always as easy though as conducting a Twitter poll, although we can take the paddling as a simple example of how you don’t always need to worry about whether you’ve made the right decision.

Twitter decided I should go for a paddle, so I did. It was fun – I felt like I was doing something exciting and exhilarating. I felt like I’d made the most of going to the beach. Let’s say though that I had decided not to paddle – I would have avoided having freezing cold feet and tiny bits of sand and stones in my boots for the rest of the day, which would have also been nice.

So this is my first point – it doesn’t normally matter what you decide, because in most cases there is no right or wrong answer.

I took this photo while I was at the beach to illustrate my point:

have I made the right decision? View Post

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Today I finally get round to reading Saturday’s papers and even get as far as some of the chunkier features in the Guardian magazine. An achievement indeed, as my BlackBerry brain is usually unable to even consider reading chunks of text larger than a rich tea biscuit.

I read a beautiful story, by Simon Van Booy, of a Christmas spent with his five year old daughter Madeleine, coming to terms with the absence of his wife, following her death two years before.

I know my kind of single parenting is never going to come close to the grief and loss that Van Booy and his daughter must feel, but there are still parts of his story that resonate. Their spontaneous visit to a Russian Orthodox cathedral for example, following an innocent enquiry by Madeleine, leads Van Booy to wonder whether he should, at some point, introduce his daughter to religion.

It is when faced with issues like these that you feel the absence of another person, another parent to share the responsibility of decision making. How can it be, you wonder, that I am expected to decide grown up things like this all by myself? But then as Van Booy’s says, “single parenting is sometimes just a case of sitting around by yourself in mild despair, not knowing what to do.”

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