A bright light on single motherhood
Despite the fact that 47 percent of Americans think single mothers are bad for society, becoming one made my life and my children’s lives much better. This was made clear to me during the covid-19 shutdown, when my kids were in third grade and kindergarten and Zoom school would drive all three of us to tears. I was making near poverty-level wages, still trying to dig myself out of the debt of divorce and the cost of living.
So I took a breath and looked around my house. The light was pouring in through the windows, my cat was asleep on my lap. I was working hard and exhausted and afraid. But I was also so happy because for the first time in my life, I had the space to do the work I loved.
Single mothers have been blamed for everything including crime rates, school shootings and poverty. We are more likely than married women to be poor and to face the pressures of the wage gap and the lack of affordable child care and health care.
Our society often doesn’t acknowledge that many single parents were forced into that situation due to issues such as abusive partners, incarceration and lack of reproductive rights. Single mothers are easy scapegoats for problems they didn’t create.
In “The Blueprint to Save America,” the Republican Study Committee’s fiscal report from June 2022, the group repeatedly emphasizes that marriage and family should be the focus of government spending instead of the social safety net. The report argues that it’s being a single parent (they never mention single fathers) that tends to lead to poverty. The solution? Force people into marriage. The Moynihan Report from 1965 and George W. Bush’s Healthy Marriage Initiative also pushed for women and mothers to enter into marriages.
But often walking out of single motherhood into marriage is like walking from one cage into a slightly bigger one. Husbands add seven hours of domestic labor per week for their wives, while a wife reduces her husband’s labor by an hour a week. Almost 20 percent of American marriages involve some form of physical violence, with emotional abuse even more prevalent. Women do more child-rearing and adjusting of their careers to accommodate family and domestic partnership. And there is a lot of evidence that supports the idea that divorced women are happier.
As a single mother, I’ve been forced to build a new kind of life. I own my house and filled it with pets, books and friends. I do less housework than when I was married. I realize part of this is the privilege of being able to find work that pays my mortgage and puts food on the table. But part of it is the equality I gained through 50/50 custody, which gave me time to work.
When I was broke and struggling in the early days of single motherhood, I would remind myself that I’d been poor before. But what I had never been was free. And in 2024, that feels radical.