What is a "single mom" these days?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Making a distinction is not the same as saying others don't deserve respect and sympathy. (I've already posted a couple of times, including the post about reading on DCUM how hard parenting is for everyone, even married parents.)

I think I find trying to make distinctions between levels or degrees of single momness is somewhat offensive. It's like saying someone is not (fill in ethnic identity) enough, or (fill in religious identity) enough. Who are we to judge/evaluate someone else's degree of single momness and why are such distinctions necessary?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Making a distinction is not the same as saying others don't deserve respect and sympathy. (I've already posted a couple of times, including the post about reading on DCUM how hard parenting is for everyone, even married parents.)

I think I find trying to make distinctions between levels or degrees of single momness is somewhat offensive. It's like saying someone is not (fill in ethnic identity) enough, or (fill in religious identity) enough. Who are we to judge/evaluate someone else's degree of single momness and why are such distinctions necessary?

Oh brother. What other offensive categories can you come up with -- only race and religion? Try harder.

[Anonymous]

I agree with 8:57. My family has several different "types" of moms. I'm a single working mom. My sister is a married working mom. My sister-in-law is a SAH mom. My stepsister is a SAH military spouse. We all have our burdens. I have to work full-time, commute long hours and take care of my daughter the majority of the week. But I make a decent salary, own a home and my daughter's father contributes, so we're doing ok financially. My stepsis has the loneliness of the six-month deployments, though they're doing fine financially and own a nice home. My sister doesn't make much and she's underwater on the home she owned before her marriage, so they're struggling. My sister-in-law gets lonely at home taking care of her two children and another child she watches during the day, and my brother doesn't make much so they're struggling.

It's ok to make distinctions between "types" of single moms, just as it's ok to make distinctions between types of married moms, working moms, SAH moms, etc. There are different types of non-moms too. (The "partier", the "homebody," the "health nut", etc.) Some of us do have more on our plates than others. Some of us have it better than others, some have it worse than others, and it depends on the individual situation, not just the "type" of mom we are. We're all deserving of respect and sometimes sympathy. (I think this is the part where we'd sing Kumbaya, but my coworkers already think I'm weird, so I'll just think it.)

[Anonymous]

Every situation is unique. I think that my own evolving parenthood shows what I mean:

--Had my daughter while married. I worked full time and my husband worked long hours. He did nothing. Friends joked that I was a "single parent" but I didn't find that funny. We had two incomes and there was, after all, someone in the house with us.
--Separated when daughter was 19 months and divorced within a year of that. He had/has custody 2 nights/week plus some vacation time. Was I a single mother? In my mind, yes. I had zero help most of the time. When I got tonsillitis I couldn't go to the doctor because DD was home sick too. When I was miserably ill I went to work anyway because it wasn't worth getting her to day care near work, then going home, then picking her up, etc. There was not another set of hands.

Plus, and this is something to know about joint custody: yes, you get a couple of "days off," but if your child's other parent is mean, manipulative, a bully, uncooperative, and not much of a parent but doesn't do anything illegal or neglectful enough to lose custody (think, smoke crack), it can be hell. My co-parenting with this guy never stopped being a nightmare. Honestly, it felt like having an extra job on top of working and parenting, and it would have been easier (and happier) to get her back for those days if I could have severed that tie.

--Not long ago, I remarried. And for all of the reasons that being a military spouse or spouse of a traveling husband is NOT the same as single parenthood, neither is my life. However, I still come to this board for two reasons. One, that time as a single parent completely shaped who my daughter and I are. It's hard to explain to partnered parents but the way you interact when it's just you two all of the time... it's just different. The second is because I see good information here about ex spouses and joint custody issues. I have a wonderful husband-- and I hope that every one of my sisters who wants partnership finds it, because it's really great and we all deserve it. But as wonderful as he is, he does not know joint custody issues and ex spouse issues like the women here do, or like I do. I still work-- very hard-- and I still shoulder more of the burden than my ex husband ever did.

It's a strange situation being an ex-single mom who still has one of the bad features of single mom life-- an extremely difficult bio dad.

So what's a single mom? I think that it's someone who knows that the world is on her shoulders and if she drops it, no one will pick up the pieces. That's how I felt.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think there are many flavors of "single mom," and our realities are different. Not better or worse, necessarily, just different, and sometimes the grass looks a lot greener. For evey one of us with no man in the picture wishing we had someone to share custody with so we could get a break, there's another one of us who would pay to make her co-parent go away if she could.

Amen to that! Inasmuch as I want my son to have a father in his life. The father is such an annoyance that I really would prefer to not deal with him at all- unless it was purely in my terms.

[Anonymous]

I've met guys saying they are single dads when in reality they are not paying child support and see the child about 2-3 times/month. That is NOT being a single parent. That's being the biological parent of a child being raised by someone else.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

So what's a single mom? I think that it's someone who knows that the world is on her shoulders and if she drops it, no one will pick up the pieces. That's how I felt.

Amen to that.