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3 Things I Wish I‘d Known About Being a Single Mom
I clumsily stumbled around and resisted it, but I wish I’d come around earlier.
Divorced Mom, sure.
Working Mom, yep.
Co-Parent, eh.
Single Mom. Whew.
It’s so easy to slip into a laundry list of complaints about how I didn’t choose this, resisting the imposition on my expectations of life and future. Especially on those exhausting days or at the end of a long week, it’s tempting to want to stomp my foot and say, “This isn’t how it was supposed to be!”
“Single Mom” carries such baggage with it, and some of that is really factual. Along with other women, we make 71 cents to every dollar that a man does. 68% of us don’t make $40k per year. We make up 30% of head of households under the poverty level.
I imagined a single mom looked like a disheveled woman with cheerios all over her car who barely makes rent, wears a constant look of exhaustion and threadbare clothes a few seasons old, shoving a frozen pizza in the oven while her kids watch cartoons. It was Michelle Pfeifer in One Fine Day, who finally shaves her legs at the of a harrowing day of doing it all, only to fall asleep next to a fully-clothed George Clooney.
