I don’t relate to all of this article, “Single Moms are Crazy” – my mother didn’t choose to be a single mother with three children and she wasn’t particularly bohemian. But I do relate to the intensity Katie Roiphe is describing in this piece about her single parent family. And I relate also to that sense of there being almost shifting tectonic plates underneath me when my father left; the way family routines and practices were being remodelled and reimagined in my home in such a spontaneous way without the immovable lines that two adults inevitably draw. And I remember liking it.
But is it more stable or secure to grow up in a house with two parents? There is arguably an absence of what people like to call borders in my house. For instance the baby seems to have caught my insomnia. Before going to bed he howls like a wolf, then says, “I am a wolf,” then says: “Where is my bottle? Where is my mango? Where is my ketchup?” then very deliberately climbs out of his bed and walks through the halls saying, “I am lost, Mama, I am lost.” It occurs to me that in this unfiltered, unmediated environment I am passing everything along to him. In any event, that’s exactly how I feel at 2 in the morning—somewhere in the middle of “I am lost” and “Where is my mango? Where is my ketchup?”
I am prepared to believe that in a household with two adults, there is often a little more balance, a healthy dilution of affection, a diffused focus that makes everyone feel comfortable. One morning I overhear Violet saying to the baby: “You can’t marry anyone. You are going to live with me.” When I first separated from her father five years ago, she said, “Mommy, it’s like you and I are married.” And this would pretty accurately reflect the atmospherics of our house: a little too much love, you might tactfully say.
Quentin Bell once wrote about growing up with his single-ish mother, the painter Vanessa Bell: “We had to balance the comforts of being so well loved against the pain of being so fearfully adored.” And that seems like a fair assessment of what goes on in my house. (The grown son of one of the single mothers I know refers to this same thing as “the unparalleled intimacy.”) But if I am being honest I like the fearful adoration, the too-muchness of it, the intensity, the fierceness. I don’t actually believe “healthy” is better.
This piece probably isn’t doing much to counter the enormous judgementalism that comes at single mothers, and Roiphe’s adventurous upper-middle class life is a long way from the reality of many other single parent households, but it is refreshing to see a single mother celebrate her single motherhood.
Hey, that was really interesting. I don’t come from a single parent family so i can’t relate. What I have noticed though is that even with having two parents in the home my daughter still cannot conceive of living with anyone except her parents and sister even when she’s grown up. Isn’t that just a developmental issue?
Yes my son assumes that he will move out of home, into his Grandparents home and that his sister will naturally live with him because she is his sister. I don’t think he quite understands yet why you might not wish to live with close family members forever. He has moved on from never moving out of home though. Our 5 year old daughter becomes very upset at the thought of not living with mum and dad and brother so we don’t go there.
I am not a single parent nor was I single parented so I can’t relate to the idea either.
That link made my night.
I shouldn’t really jump in on this, since I really don’t want to add to any negative voices against single moms, but: I really resent that last line. She may love the intensity, but I’m not sure her kids do. My husband and I were both raised by single moms and… it wasn’t healthy, and it wasn’t better. (Although, the specific personalities of our specific parents definitely come into play here. The same intimacy with a different set of people could be just fine.)
I have always been a staunch defender of single mothers. My mum raised my brother and I alone and in pretty desperate financial circumstances. I nonetheless had a very happy childhood and was very very close with my mum. But as I have gotten older I have come to realise that a lot of the dynamic in our household wasn’t necessarily healthy for me longterm. My mum invested everything into us children and depended on us for so much emotional support (and still does). In many ways she sought the support from us that she would have got from a partner. She confined in me about so many things that she would ordinarily have confined in a partner (romantic issues, financial issues etc that in retrospect where HUGE for a small child to deal with) and depended on me to bring her out of bad moods, depression etc. I had a lot of anxiety as a child that has carrying over to adulthood. I still worry about her almost constantly.
I also wonder whether a lot of bad treatment that my brother and I have suffered would have been diffused if my mother had had someone to pull her up about it more. For example, she would often take her bad moods out on us and still does by screaming and saying the most terrible things. She would always feel terrible afterwards. I have told my husband that I ever do the same to my daughter then he must stop me. But my mother never had anyone around to tell her that how she was treating us wasn’t good.
She has also really resented me growing up and marrying and having my own family because it means that I am not as available to her. And I have huge guilt issues that I am not around for her like I was as a child. I can’t say all that is easy for my marriage and I have had to learn to not feel so guilty about being happy in my own personal life.
It may just have been my mother’s own difficult personality but, for now, I am so grateful to have my husband to provide the balance and support that my mother never had.
I have painted my mother in a bad light but since having my daughter I realise how incredibly lonely and stressful things must have been for her. Not only not having someone to share the difficult times with but noone to have a glass of wine and laugh with once we went to sleep.
Like so many other things, the bad behavior in the presence of another adult depends a lot on who the adults are. I lived for a while with a friend of a friend who was just out of a very bad marriage, who told me later she parented a lot more calmly and copefully than she would have if she didn’t know I was there, hearing/seeing her.
But my parents fed each other’s anger and authoritarianism because they had both been taught total control = better parenting. Being watched by each other made both of them more likely to shout or yell than either would have done alone.
I was raised by a middle class single mother, or by a struggling, used-to-be middle class single mother, and if anything I think I’m more intimate with my child (and partner) than my mother was with myself or my brothers. This is not a criticism of coldness, though, merely an observation on how her gentle introversion lent itself to a parenting style that was attached but not overinvolved or lacking in boundaries. I had a secure childhood, considering.
But my mother was and is a very organised, highly introverted person, neither of which are traits I find in myself. I can see my male partner — who resembles my mother more than I do in this respect — helps bring a balance to our household that might not exist otherwise. I don’t know. Everything, as always, seems situation and person dependent. And some children thrive in households others find suffocating.
I had a similar experience of being raised by a single mother too, Ida. If anything, despite being perfectly secure and whatnot, I was much less emotionally ‘close’ to my mother than my friends were with theirs – I think because while their mothers could play Good Cop, my mum was always, of course, both Good Cop and Bad Cop. She was two parents rolled into one. Borders were ordinary, and she never overshared at all, and actually I have found it weird adjusting to our adult relationship, which is more open, and of course more ‘equal’, although as kids my sister and brother were slightly closer emotionally with her than I was, so that might just be me. I think the only thing that really stood out about our family as single-parent was that my siblings and I were quite close, largely because we had to join forces against the interloper boyfriends (two ended up being awful; the current one is fine). The enemy of my enemy. Having said all that, I don’t know how I’m going to cope with having to share parenting responsibilities with my partner when I’m so used to the ways of the one-party regime
Incidentally, my ma is a kindy teacher, and she says it’s really common for little boys to declare that they will marry their mothers.
This is an interesting article and discussion. I am neither a single mother nor the daughter of a single mother, so I have no personal observation here. But I wonder if some of the differences in response to single motherhood depend a bit on how the mother feels about the circumstances that have made her a single mother and whether or not she has the resources to buy the little breathing space that having a partner can provide (i.e., a night out w/o kids, etc.) I suspect also that the dynamic changes if custody is shared with the ex-partner.
I’d be interested to hear other Single Mothers by Choice comment on this idea of intensity in the single parent family. I think the dynamics are different when you choose to have a child with someone and end up a single mother, rather than if you make the choice after weighing all of the consequences of having a child on your own from the beginning. I think the consequences for the child are different too. I am an only child, raised by an overinvolved, overbearing, obsessed mother. I can completely relate to “We had to balance the comforts of being so well loved against the pain of being so fearfully adored.” I refuse to do that to my daughter, despite being a single mother of an only child.
But, can one effectively examine intensity while being in the inside? Would someone look at my and my daughter and judge our family as having too much intensity?
This is interesting for me because I am both a single mother and not – that is, my husband works 350 miles away for part of the year and during those times only comes home every 2 weeks. So I have some of the experiences of single motherhood, but not the full experience. I guess military moms might feel the same way (?). My theory is that the intensity stems from the lack of a safety net. I bet if you were wealthy and had a nanny and/or really amazing close by family support it might feel differently. But most single mothers struggle, financially, logistically, emotionally. It’s hard enough to be a WOHM but having a partner provides a kind of safety net. Without that net, it’s like the whole family is inching across a tight rope over a deep chasm a millimeter at a time. Any small hiccup can cause everyone to just fall in – illnesses, lay offs, child care meltdowns, last minute meetings. These things are always an annoyance, but for a single parent it can spell catastrophe. So you have a sense of immediacy and intensity just in your day to day life, and it makes sense that that would affect the parent-child dynamic. You become a team in a different way – maybe like pioneer families were teams? Every one has to pitch in on a deeper level because no one has anything to spare, there’s no give in the system. I can also see how that could translate into an emotional over-reliance of parent on child.
(We’ve noticed generally that our children behave differently when they are alone with one of us than with both. The children always sense the shifting dynamics, and seem to understand intuitively when there’s less available for them. They entertain themselves happily on mornings when I’m alone with them, but when dad’s around they beg endlessly for someone to play with them. I don’t know how/if this would be different for a kid who was always just with one parent.)
For three years after their separation (before my mother gained custody after the legal wrangling) my brother and I were single-parented by our father. My brother chose to move back in with him when I was 12, he 8, and was single-parented as effectively an only child for 10 years, with holidays spent together, at whichever parent we were up to. That Quentin Bell quote resonates terribly strongly, thinking about both our paternal relationships. There was what feels like so much (over)investment.
[And with so much similarity I find myself also wondering in what ways we may differ from those single parented by mothers, in general]
Being single parent isn’t easy. But child will grow up, people will get used to it. ^.^
And then the intensity kinda becomes normal and you carry it with you into your relationships and, well there is a steep learning curve. I really like that line, “the unparalleled intimacy”
Yes.