Today is exactly a month since March 21, which is International Single Parents’ Day. And I find myself going forwards and backwards in time trying to think up an unputdownable piece for one of the most progressive broadsheets. The subject: those who mother solo.
What makes them? What is it that MAKES single moms? What hurtles them towards that pivot point in their lives? What makes single moms do what they do, and, conversely, not do what they don’t? Finally, what unmakes them? All sorts of questions come to me when I start thinking.
I think I should know the answers, having been at this gig for 12 years now. It’s only after a dozen years of learning on the job, not to mention nine gestational months bracing for it, that I am ready for a lucky 13 years’ worth of storytelling; okay, not the full ramble, but top takes for sure.
Let’s look at the arc that I have traversed, for instance, from being a person who used to be defensive about the single-mom tag, used it sparingly, situationally, sometimes going to great lengths to insist moms are moms are moms are... to one who wants to shout from the rooftops today that ‘I am. Single mom. Love me. Hate me. I won’t let you ignore me’.
How we choose words matters, like using ‘disabled’ or ‘differently-abled’ or ‘specially-abled’ when we want to talk matter-of-factly about bodily disabilities or represent them through a grammar of grace. Yes, it does take a village to bring up future citizens and makers of the world. Yes, most moms — and some dads — are essentially doing it alone, coupled or not.
But as a self-partnered woman who does the hard labour of rearing children largely by herself, one must celebrate this unique nomenclature — single mom — to engage boldly with social structures that don’t understand it fully even now, to leverage it even and wrest privileges and derive unfair advantages as every minority or marginalised community is wont to doing.
There is a ton of politics in this. But who are we kidding? This is 2021. It has been legit to personalise politics and politicise the personal since the 20th century. Long-held chains of order and privacy (‘internal matters’, dirty laundry, et al) are begging to be examined as venerated institutions rupture.
Time was when large joint families gave way to compact nuclear ones. Switch to the present. Deep fissures threaten to atomise four-member structures across many, many households. Is, hum dono, the new hum do, hamare do?
As marriage has evolved and mutated, a new strain, in effect, a novel version of patriarchy, has installed. Arlie Russell Hochschild, academic and sociologist who coined terms like ‘emotional labour’ and phrases like ‘economy of gratitude’, in her seminal book about unfair divisions of labour, The Second Shift, wrote: “Formerly, many men dominated women within marriage. Now, despite a much wider acceptance of women as workers, men dominate women anonymously outside the marriage. Patriarchy has not disappeared; it has changed form. In the old form, women were forced to obey an overbearing husband in the privacy of an unjust marriage. In the new form, the working single mother is economically abandoned by her former husband and ignored by a patriarchal society.”
Join me as I attempt to lens it, sometimes with passionate expressions of barely-concealed outrage, sometimes with light touches of good-natured humour, often with an agenda to provoke and always with the desire to make a difference.
I want to finally envision a world where a child — who didn’t ask to be born — can never, ever be deserted by a parent; where they don’t grow up carrying the burden of shame and guilt of being abandoned that should never be theirs to bear; and contain the violent cycle of ‘man handing misery to man’ (props to Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse).
Somebody wise mentioned to me once, ‘There are problems. But there are always more solutions than problems in this world’. To this lady, who shone a flashlight of courage when despair and darkness had shrouded me, I transfer my well-worn cape.
In this column, I will uncloak this super-symbolic, super-heroic cape. And not be coy about wearing its underpants on the outside, its heart on its sleeve, its emotions in your face, as it writes out the saga of single parenthood as lived experience of a single mom who is also a full-time working woman, part-time slacktivist and a fierce advocate of putting a child’s rights above all.
It will talk about its highs, its lows, the great days when we marvel at the gift of our children (and also, the gifter), the lousy days when we just can’t get out of bed, the urgent issues of solving practical challenges (How to get your child a passport, or yourself a house to rent? Can you get a loan?).
And there are the important issues of long-term anguishes — therapy, anybody? When can I date again? Should I remarry? What happens to my child if I die suddenly?
What it will not be about is a broad-strokes take on single parenthood. Sorry, single dads — but you guys just don’t get the short end of the patriarchy stick.
I will take a leap of faith and state here, I am making this about myself. And those who mirror me, eclipse me, shadow me. A growing number of working women who are pulling more than their fair share of shifts because the shared parenting dream went bust. Because the ‘other parent’ bailed.
To repeat and spotlight that we are experiencing a new form of public abandonment, very different from the private oppressions in earlier generations of marriages — but all versions of unfair, unequal, unacceptable terms that continue to define unjust partnerships.
It is alive, it is kicking women like me in the gut and it is nowhere close to being smashed. This is also not just about me. But to share with those outside this specific ghetto that there are many normals — new, old, different, unique. Other baselines and different strokes that act as a runway for different folks.
Don’t you want to know how we do it? We may yet learn a bit about co-parenting through this column. Where a team of two estranged but well-meaning adults are able to adultingly resolve the best interests of — or, as is current in legal parlance, least detriments of their wards.
Life is what we make of it. We have earned the privilege to land our Mother Ships without a co-pilot. (NB — he parachuted).
What are you waiting for, Captain?
Let’s go!
Srimati Roy is a passionate marketer with a strong background in media, premium brands and content
