Single Motherhood Is a Bitch

Wait. Let me rephrase. Single mothering is a thankless bitch.

Whether you're a professional single mom with a job away from your kids, or you're a full time, stay-at-home mother, being a mom is a huge job, even when you have the help of a spouse or significant other. But being a single mother is, without a doubt THE biggest job in the world. As the custodial parent after divorce, it comes with the most responsibility, has the longest lasting good or bad effects, yet we land in it without training of any kind. There's no handbook, no pay to speak of, it's not something that we 'volunteer' for, and the costs are immeasurable. It has the longest hours, requires a skill-set like no other job on this planet (or any other), and has a massive learning curve that's a challenging, never-ending son-of-a-bitch to say the absolute least.

It requires the patience of Mother Theresa (who, by the way, had NO children), and it requires near sainthood to maintain sanity beyond the child's age of about two.

As Single Mothers, we get precious little respect for what we do. We're generally made to struggle for everything that we give our children (and the dog, and the hamster...), and we're often the recipients of tantrums and side-eye dirty glances when we've made a decision that is unpopular in our households, and those decisions are always ours to make. But we make them on a second to second basis, in spite of the backlash that's to come. We grow an alligator-like skin that is resistant to those tantrums and dirty looks, for the simple sake of the fact that if we don't stand firm, bad things could happen. It's all riding on us.

We do everything but leap tall buildings in a single bound. We are superheroes without capes.

When the bulk of our mothering days are over and the hardest of the work is done, society offers us very little in the way of thanks or reciprocation for the years that we spent "training" those productive, talented, intelligent, creative humans that we call our offspring, in order to 'present' them to the societal fold. Our children are generally mirrors of everything that we've given, and given up, in order for them to thrive. They make us proud every single hour, of every single day.

Our children are the people who ground us. They make us happy, and sometimes they make us sad (hopefully the happy outweighs the sad). But at the end of the day, they are the one thing that 'make' us, as mothers, single or not, who we are. They are a representation of what and how we've taught them to treat others, to contribute, to love, and to give of themselves as they would have others give to them.

I've been a single mother since I was 31 years old. My children are now grown and out on their own. I raised a programmer, a singer, and at 19, my youngest is now an adult, a strong young man, figuring himself out in the world. They are the people that I most enjoy spending time with, and vainly, I think that might be because they are each 'mirrors' of me in one way or another.

Single mothering is a thankless bitch. Even the children that we raised can be neglectful of giving thanks, and to say that it's just a difficult thing to do would be a rude understatement. Raising children on my own has been without a doubt the most difficult thing I've ever done, or ever will do. But the reward of having done it well is worth anything that we as mothers have to "give up" in the process.

Peace xo

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