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The One Thing I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before I Became a Single Mom
"If you had told me, when I was young, that I would one day be a single mother, I would have thought many things: none of them positive."
By Katie Brandi
My older daughter has a term she learned in school for when a painting doesn't end up looking the way she planned. If she turns the picture a different direction she may see something she hadn't before, or if she adds something here or there it might become a whole different painting. Maybe one even better than what she had intended. She calls it a "Beautiful Oops." As a psychotherapist, I know that there are some difficult life events that can't be recast as anything but awful. But there are some things—in my case single motherhood—that can be surprising when looked at upside-down.
If you had told me, when I was young, that I would one day be a single mother, I would have thought many things: none of them positive. Well, maybe one thought would have been positive: at least I will be a mother. But I would not have meant it from a place of perspective and gratitude; I would have meant it as woe-is-me, at least I'll get a shred of silver lining in what will obviously be a semi-disastrous life.
Mostly this news would have left me in utter terror, viewing single motherhood as something meant for women made of tougher stock than I have. Women who were selfless and wily and knew useful things, like stretching a dollar and assembling cribs. I would have feared that I could be broken by single motherhood, that being alone with the monumental task of raising a person would shine an interrogation light on any cracks in me.
But, not only does life not always end up where you imagine it will, but thankfully you don't always end up being the person you imagined you'd be.
My first husband and I got separated when our daughter was six months old, and my Lifetime movie version of single motherhood—total desperation matched with lift-the-car-off-the-baby strength—was nowhere to be found. My life might have been different from what I expected, but there was too much to do for either wallowing or heroics.
I had to roll up my sleeves and figure things out. Some of those were logistical: Where were we going to live when we moved out of our house? Who could we rely on since my family was too far away to help? How I was going to get her to daycare in the morning and still be in front of the class I was teaching on time?
Others were just the things you figure out as a new parent, things that if still married I might have delegated to her father, but during her time with me I couldn't hide behind any I-don't-know-how-to-do-this histrionics. These were things like finding the right mixture of singing and chatter to calm my crying child when we were alone in the car. And acknowledging that when she got up in the morning, I was getting up, and when she needed to eat, I was going to have to figure out how and what to feed her.
There was a delightful clarity and simplicity to these tasks that kept the questions swirling in my head at bay. When things got hard and I was filled with doubt about our next step, I would resist the urge to climb in my daughter's crib with her so that she could make me feel better. But I did watch her sleep sometimes and let the rhythm of her breathing and the perfect curve of her cheek bring me back to Earth. Uncertainty left me no choice but to focus on what was in front of me. And, with my expectations of the future limited to hoping I would remember to retrieve her from the grocery cart, a door was opened where unexpected joys could pop in. A hazy future made for a Technicolor present.
Since a major life event had found its way into our home so early in my daughter's life, the game was changed. I had already gotten something so wrong that I was less concerned with getting everything else right. As long as I could hold the center together, the imperfections on the edges didn't matter.
I would convince myself daily that people would mistake the spit-up and applesauce on my clothes for a fashion-forward abstract pattern. In the day care class picture, my daughter was wearing Valentine's Day pajamas. It was neither Valentine's Day, nor was it Pajama Day. Sometimes I would hand her over to the women at daycare or to her dad and pretend I didn't notice she needed her diaper changed so that they would have to do it. I adopted philosophies around things like sleep training and potty training that could be summed up with: She'll figure it out before college.
When my daughter was six, I got remarried, and the day after her eighth birthday, I gave birth to her little sister. I was apprehensive before the baby was born about learning to mother all over again, given the new circumstances. I had learned to be a mom in the sometimes stressful, often wonderful, always priority-clarifying bubble that was my life alone with my older daughter. It was strange to think that I was nervous to embark on the married kind of parenthood that I had long ago imagined, but single motherhood was what I knew and what now felt like me.
So I decided to let the good parts of single motherhood inform my experience of un-single motherhood. The most important lesson for me was that there isn't a prescribed role of good mother that I need to cram myself into. As long as I take the basics seriously, the details should be sources of delight, not of stress.
For the sake of my older daughter, I hate that her father and I are divorced, and I would never want to make light of the impact that has on her. But I also know that there was an element of Beautiful Oops in her childhood that has helped to make her the curious and open person she is. She knows, and I hope her sister will one day know, too, that when the teddy bear birthday cake keels over, there is no reason he can't become a perfectly respectable volcano. That if you love your dog walker Halloween costume it doesn't matter if no one can guess what you are. (The cards were stacked against her: Dog walkers just wear everyday clothes and we don't have a dog.) And that it's ok to wear your sequined skating dress to bed for a month straight. After its stint as pajamas it probably won't regain its original shape. But it certainly will have been loved, in all of its many forms.
Katie Brandi is a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.
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