Mothering and Recovery Nine
Single Moms At Work and At Home
There are two broad categories for single moms: those with exes who are in the children’s lives, and those where the partners are not now, or perhaps have never been, involved in the children’s lives.
Single moms where the other parent is not in the picture, rely on alloparents and as much paid labour as they can squeeze in, or they are living on assistance as stay-at-home moms.
Financial precarity is central for either working or at-home single mothers, when the other biological parent is not in the equation. Even for those with fulltime well-paying jobs, the worry is always, as the sole provider for the children, any inability to work is instantly dire.
For many it’s not feasible to have adequate extended healthcare for illness or injury, or to cover the cost of having an adequate life insurance policy. If you have any of your own family on the scene, then have a conversation about whether they would be willing to pay the premiums for you on a life insurance policy if your budget simply cannot accommodate that cost. The same is true for the massive outlays for adequate healthcare coverage in the US—if family are in a position to pay health insurance premiums for you then that can drastically ease the worries you may have as to how on earth you and your children are going to survive if you face illness or injury.
While this is true for any parent in any circumstance, as a single mom when the other biological parent is not on the scene, make sure you have legally assigned a guardian for your children should anything happen to you. If your own parents are involved as alloparents or babysitters, then make sure to have the conversation and make it clear either way as to whether you are, or are not, making them guardians for the children in the event something happens to you. Also, consider that the biological father may contest a guardianship choice you have made and if it’s possible to have a written agreement ahead of time with the biological father, that may avoid an extended period of time where your children are both grieving and also insecure as to what their own future might look like.
Often grandparents want to offer financial support by paying directly for things for the grandchildren. If you are able to have the conversation with your parents, ask them to consider the value to the grandchildren of paying for your legal and ongoing costs to have proper guardianship, a will and insurance policies for illness, injury and/or death set up. Having those things in place prevents a lot of additional trauma and damage for children. If your parents are not involved, perhaps siblings, aunts, uncles or even your own grandparents are involved. You may be from a family where these things are never discussed, so get out some books from the library on how to broach topics of illness and death and the overall security for your children should anything happen to you. You can find lots of estate planning information for single parents online as well.
Because parenting is nuclear in our societies, it’s difficult for single moms to have sufficient alloparenting connections so that they receive adequate downtime away from their unpaid labour. Often, the hours given to you by any alloparent/babysitter will only allow for you to handle more unpaid labour (running errands, taking one child to an appointment while the other is at home…). Consider joining some single mom groups, either online or near you physically. If you have other single mothers near you, pooling resources can allow for each parent to have true downtime in turn. And even if you don’t spell each other off for childcare, you have people facing all the same stressors as you and that definitely alleviates the isolation you experience as a single mother doing it all on your own.
Joint custody arrangements, while often stressful to manage in their own right, do allow for single moms to have a break from the unpaid labour of raising children. You will often hear single moms say they experience less stress being separated from the children’s other parent because it has lowered the amount of unpaid labour and provides for complete breaks from it as well.
As above, estate planning and discussions about illness, injury and custody are equally important for alleviating stress when the children’s other parent is involved in their lives as when they are not.
By far the most isolating facet of single motherhood is the heavy stigma in our societies.
“I thought that instantly people would think that I was stupid, uneducated, and a drain on the economy. I thought they would think that I should never have had a child, that my daughter would grow up disadvantaged and that I was scraping by, and barely keeping it together. Single mothers are often thought of as run down, unkempt, dole bludging [an equivalent term for this for Americans would be: “welfare queen,”], irresponsible, exhausted, possibly drug addicted, irresponsible [purposeful duplicate by the author], selfish, young people who cannot get their shit together. The implication is that it’s our fault we are single.”
That quote is from a blogger discussing the stigma of single motherhood. If that list doesn’t make you wince, it should. If any of that has somehow been internalized by you, as a single mother, then making it explicit helps you to recognize that it’s a toxic and flawed way to frame your life and decisions. Doing so can get you a long way towards lowering your need for brain manipulation tools.
Whether you’re a single mom by choice or by circumstance makes no difference. You are fulfilling a role with the same level of commitment and responsibility as any mother with a partner or partners in the equation. Remind yourself that by being aware of all the negative connotations that our society happily assigns to “single mother,” you are able to reject their toxic influence on your life and, most specifically, the level of stress you experience.
Part 10 Coming May 16.
https://www.singlemothersurvivalguide.com/single-mother-stigma/
Image in synopsis: Flickr.com: Infinite Eyes
