Words of Singledom: Single Mom

Words are powerful tools that have differentiated humanity from the rest of the animal planet.  And while that statement is debatable, this one really isn’t:  words have also differentiated us singles from the rest of humanity.  Single mom.  That’s a powerful little package.  I’m not entirely sure what it means.  In its most powerful it is said with a grave face in low tones, such as when the principal at the school I worked at last year handed me the file on a struggling student, uttering those two little words single mom.  I wanted to say, “Yes? Me?” or “Oh, are you calling me that now? Because I prefer my proper name but I guess that works.” 

         Instead I said, “Single moms rock it.  Single moms make the world go round.  Without single moms, there would be a whole shitload of orphans out there.”  Well, not exactly that.  But something close.  He looked at me with his bright cat-like eyes (they really were kittenish, so much so that I sometimes expected him to start purring during his long pauses).  “I get it,” he said.  “I’m a single dad.”

         Ok.  But single dad isn’t the little word bomb single mom is.  Single dad doesn’t mean financially struggling, four children diagnosed with ADHD, hair washed with dry shampoo until it looks like a topiary, shuffling morosely through the grocery store aisle too blinded by the mountain of Hamburger Helper to see the snot covering her kids’ faces.  If anything, a single dad is hot.  He’s a hero, really, raising that darling little girl on his own and adoring her like he does and who cares that her face is a little snotty?  He always rises to the occasion.  And HE looks good with buffalo grass hair.   And in all fairness, when the kitten principal said single mom it was a judgment and he knew it.  He thought he was telling me the reason, the root, of this poor child’s horrible school performance.  

         It took me a year of divorce to realize those words, single mom, applied to me.  Ouch.  Can we just be a little more honest and say, alone in the word mom.  Or, mom adrift with her tiny children.

         The reality of marriage in 2014 is there is less of it than there has been in the last, say, 300 years.  But people still want their babies, as evidenced by the fact that they are having them.  So listen up people, single moms are on the rise!  As are single dads.  Those terms, single mom and single dad are going to have to broaden.  They are going to have to include people who choose single parenthood and people who are financially just fine and people who with their one or two or two dozen kids, as the lone head of house, create complete families.  So next time one of my friends expresses reluctance to let her child play at the home of a single mom, I hope I have the guts to say, “You mean complete parent.”  Or, even better, “You mean whole package mom.”

The Best Little Broken Home in Tucson

(Also find at http://www.elephantjournal.com/2014/03/the-best-little-broken-home-in-tucson-molly-knipe/)

I have never liked the term broken home.  Maybe it’s because according to those who use it, I come from one, and the words hurt.  What child wants the place they come from to be called broken?  My wish is that we have language that honors everyone’s home, no matter how many parents and no matter their married or divorced status.  I think “home” is enough—no need to qualify it as broken, repaired, or having always been in one lovely piece. 

When I was little I pondered this term and what it meant.  As little kids do, I took it literally, and the words evoked a tiny wooden house, falling apart in disrepair.  If there had once been a picket fence, the paint had now peeled and there were holes where the posts had fallen down.  Truly broken.  But because I had the upbringing I did, where I was frequently informed about the strife of others, I didn’t ask the obvious question:  Well if it’s broken, why don’t they just fix it?  I understood there was a weightiness to the term broken home.  These were dilapidated, falling apart homes that the parents just couldn’t fix.  Not only broken, but unrepairable.

Then, it happened to me.  My home broke and I didn’t want anyone to know it.  From the outside, it looked mostly the same.  On the inside, it was heavy with its brokenness:  the broken dream of a family with two parents and two kids, and for me, the broken thing I had always known as truth: that my parents loved each other.  I no longer knew what was true about family and I was newly burdened with what felt like a curse:  living in an unrepairable home. 

I wonder what it would have been like for me if after my parents’ divorce I didn’t inherit that broken home.  A changed home, yes.  A grieving home for a time, yes.  But a broken beyond repair home?  That should never be bestowed upon any of us, especially a child.

For the past five years I have worked with kids who were legally severed from their parents—kids in the foster care system.  They originally came from homes that someone somewhere would call the most broken—with not just divorce, but drug use, abuse, neglect, and transient-ness.  And I found that what these kids need and deserve is no different than what we all need when speaking of the places we come from or the homes we have created—honoring.

To me, honoring need not mean celebrating or condoning.  It means witnessing and respecting.  These days, I tend to get all riled up when someone says a child came from a broken home.  On a good day, I’ll ask: What is a broken home?  On another day, I’ll say:  Me too.  I come from a broken home.  I’ve created a broken home.  My daughters are growing up in a broken home.  Let me tell you something about it.  There is no dad that lives there.  There never has been.  The kitchen is pink and every pet but the hamster is a female.  The hamster gets the title, man of the house.  I don’t have a doormat that says Welcome to Our Broken Home because to me it is not broken at all; it is the best little brick home, full of life and love, no more broken than the little brick houses scattering the street with the married people inside.

We are all broken, some of us a little and some of us a lot.  We are all somewhere on our own journeys of brokenness and repair.  I never wanted that broken home of my childhood, but I came to love the two homes that were born from the brokenness.  I never wanted my own divorce, but I have come to be deeply grateful for the home that was created in its wake.  I think many of us have this love and gratitude for the places we come from, even with their deep flaws.  After my divorce I always imagined myself like a chick emerging from an egg—wobbly and disoriented, but ready to walk into the new world.   Maybe that is the beauty of the broken home—like an egg, cracked into a bunch of pieces, but also like an egg— a new life emerges.  

The Upside of Divorce for Dads and Daugthers

Don’t get me wrong, no matter the circumstances divorce is a tangled knot of losses for everyone involved. But there are gains (sometimes enormous) in divorce as well, and maybe we don’t talk enough about those. Self-discovery is at the top of my list of gains from my own divorce (as is getting to paint my kitchen pink), and my dad is at the top of my list in gains from my parents’ divorce.

This isn’t a study I have run, yet-- just my own story. My parents divorced when I was seven. I spent the first two years hoping that what I was living was a bad dream and that I would wake up-- to my formerly married parents and our family of four— and to dad’s waffles and mom’s poached eggs. By the time I was a teenager, my own self-absorption and emerging social life overwhelmed my thoughts of my parents’ divorce (and that’s a good thing.) Even during the bad dream phase, I look back now and realize how lucky I was. My parents didn’t rage against each other, didn’t poison me with passive aggressive barbs towards the other parent, and always supported me in loving the other parent. When I look at some of the divorces today I am really saddened to see how parents burden their children with the unresolved anger they have towards the other parent. But that’s not my childhood story.   

The other way that I was lucky is that my dad was different. I noticed it at the time, but I notice it even more now as I look back on that time in my life. When I was a teenager my parents were once again living in the same town. I spent time at both of their homes, though most of my time was at the mall, trying on prom dresses I was never going to buy, and at sleepovers, crank calling our crushes (maybe we were immature teenagers.) My dad was the only dad I knew who would come to my high school almost every week and pick me up for lunch. Even though I spent time at his home, this time was different, because this time was just me and my dad--no distracting brother and no dad’s needy girlfriend. We would usually eat at the fish place one block away from the high school. My dad would ask me all about ME. I hope I found out about him back then, but my guess is that I probably didn’t ask. What I did find out about him was the kind of dad he was. 

My teenage friends were all slipping away from their parents and seeking independence, as was I. But when they needed someone to lean on, when Becky got stranded drunk at a party or when Stacey, god forbid, thought she might be pregnant, it was eventually the moms who were called. The dads let the moms handle it. Because we all know our daughters’ emerging adult selves, including their sexuality, is a psychological minefield, sometimes especially for fathers. Sometimes it is easier for parents to designate that sticky emotional goop to the moms. I think it happens all of the time, but I hope that’s changing.

When I got to college my phone calls home went to both parents’ houses. There is that stereotype we all know—college kid calls home and dad answers, grunts twice and says, “here your mother wants to talk to you.” Hopefully that is now antiquated silliness. But I gotta say it, when I was in college, my girlfriends were not calling home to their dads. But I was. Was this the upside of divorce or just my special relationship with my special dad? 

The upside of dropping your smartphone in the toilet is that maybe you pay a different kind of attention to your child that day. Maybe you’re not checking your phone as you pick her up from school or walk through the store together.  The upside of divorce is that you get a window or maybe longer as a single parent.  Maybe you take advantage of that and start to do the work you leaned on the other parent to do. As a single mom, it crossed my mind that my daughters never played in a physical way with me like they did with their dad. So we started playing tag at the park as part of our weekly time together. They probably won’t be writing a little essay about it when they’re 40, but hey, who knows?

Today, I am 41, and my dad is one of my closest friends. When I found out my husband was cheating on me and I couldn’t see the road for the tears in my eyes, my dad’s was the house I drove to. 

So this is a shout out first to my formerly single dad, but also to all dads, single and otherwise, saying hey, keep up the good work. Keep walking towards that teen girl who is walking away. She needs you.