The early days of solo parenthood felt like slapstick comedy, one horrible pantomime after the other. Melbourne was freezing and grey, an inhospitable moonscape that seemed to mock my every attempt at a normal routine. Leaving the house was an hour-long exercise of nappies and bottle prep and a toddler tantrum about needing to a warm jacket. I would clop unsteadily down four flights of stairs, toddler in one arm and pram in the other, my backpack threatening to topple me forwards. Thankfully I never did, not once, but the threat of hurtling forwards into the glass windows to the ground below was never far from my mind.

In fact, emergencies have very rarely come up as a single parent, but when they do… it’s chaos. In most families, there is at least one other person to panic with you. They can be an objective idiot yet still fill the role of being another adult human to mop at flooding water with tea towels, or remove glass from your foot with tweezers, or hold the end of a collapsing shelf until you can remove all the glassware. When you’re on your own, however, it’s fully-fledged chaos — everything explodes in the blink of an eye, and there’s not a single thing you can do. They may say it takes a village, but I can testify that when push comes to shove, it takes two fully grown adults at a minimum.

I remember one weekend particularly well. We were getting for bed when Minty accidentally locked herself in the bathroom. I was stunned with the unfamiliar urgency of it all. Usually I would have my ex-husband to calm me down, to assure me that it wasn’t an emergency and I just needed to breathe. But no, this was an emergency, and a proper one at that. I had no idea what to do. I rattled the handle, I kicked the door, I even threw myself against it like a Hollywood blockbuster. No matter what I did, the door wouldn’t open. It dawned on me that I would have to call for help, and I’m sorry to report that my first reaction was deep embarrassment. It was sort of like asking for directions in your home town: surely I was meant to know what to do? It was my first time calling 000 and I stuttered with awkwardness when it answered. “Police, Fire, Ambulance, what is your emergency?” the operator barked.

“I - uh - my daughter is locked in the bathroom,” I stammered. “She’s only two. I have lots of drugs in there. Legal drugs! Legal drugs. Is she - can someone come and help?” I started to cry. “How much does this cost?”

After a brief exchange — and reassurance that fire rescue is a free service — I hung up and went back to my frantic knocking on the door. The panic was real. “Baby, can you open the door?” I heard baby babble, then the sound of a drawer opening. “No, Minty, the door. The door. Not the drawer.” The waiting felt like eternity. Where where they? What if she turned on a scalding hot tap? What if she ate a card of sleeping tablets? What if, what if, what if? Finally, around 9pm, a fire engine (lights, siren, the whole thing) had screamed into my quiet East Melbourne street, with a squadron of firemen scaling the four flights of stairs two at a time. They were alarmingly good looking. Standing there with tears streaking through my freshly-applied fake tan and leopard print pyjamas, I could have peeled my skin off in humiliation. I felt naked, and so very, very alone.

With the open bathroom drawers blocking the door from opening, we all agreed that the door was solidly jammed. It couldn’t be opened more than 5cm and the firemen were getting serious. We were discussing how to remove the door off it’s hinges when slowly and ever so casually, the bathroom door opened. “Hi mama,” said Minty, waddling out in her Bluey pyjamas and ignoring the team of firemen in our living room. Eyes wide, I turned to the firemen. “I’m…so sorry,” I started when the tallest started laughing. “It’s no hassle, honestly,” he said. “It happens all the time.” In a sea of apologies, the pack of firemen packed up their gear and trotted calmly back down the stairs calling out jolly farewells. I remember thinking how quickly they had run up, and how slowly they descended.

“Bye! Thank you!” I called out weakly. Unbeknown to us all, Minty had spent her imprisonment using my Chanel lipsticks to draw all over the back of the door. With her safely in bed later that night, scrubbing $150 lipstick off the walls, I cried. Big, heaving hiccups of that pain that comes from heart-stopping fear, experienced alone.

And just when you think it couldn’t get worse, it did. The next morning, exhausted from the turmoil of the night before, I went to the kitchen to make a coffee. Reaching to the top shelf for a cup, the shelf misbalanced and slipped, releasing a whole set of kitchen plates onto the floor. They fell with an extraordinary noise and all I could do was cover my head with my arms as they rained around me. When the last shard was still, I looked up frantically for Minty, who thankfully was out of harms way. We looked at each other in silence. As yet another round tears begun, Minty stared at me impassively. She watched me while I cried. In that moment, I hated her. I hated the house. I hated the stupid plates, and the sexy firemen, and most all of, I hated myself.

You don’t easily forget these moments. To me, they feel totally singular to the experience of being a single parent, but I suppose they arise to anyone learning to navigate life alone after a separation. Everything - everything - feels harder than it should. Everyday tasks like work, daycare, food shopping or exercise suddenly took on a new heaviness. It was an overnight switch for me, motherhood going from being hard to being almost impossible. I was tired deep into my bones, and more than once wondered if I would just collapse from exhaustion. I never did.

A year on and the load has lightened. I have hacked my way through the jungle of single parenthood, creating a small path forward. Last night I was sitting with Minty by the bath when I noticed black smoke crawling in fingers under the door. “Oh, shit!” I said. “Oh, shit!” said Minty. I leapt off the floor and ran to the kitchen when my entire oven was in flames. A rogue chicken nugget had caught alight and turned into a fireball in the oven. I opened the door and the flames roared. I shut the door. Baby. Bath. Drowning? I ran back to the bathroom, pulled Minty out and into a towel, and ran with her back into the kitchen. I didn’t know what to do so I called my neighbour Sandra. She also didn’t know what to do either, and had just got her hair done so didn’t want to get chicken nugget smoke in it. So, for five long minutes, the three of us stood in my kitchen doorway, staring at the fireball slowly simmer down into flames, then a single flame, then a flicker, then a billow of black smoke. It was…fine. It was all fine. And if that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.