One recurring theme that has come up among the nurses at the hospital is that most have been single mothers. One was telling me as we were fixing my mom’s bed that her three week old grandchild was sick and she was unable to think of anything else right now. She said, “I was a single mom when my kids were little and I had to struggle to work and take care of them and I never had time to enjoy them. But this baby, I just want to be with him all the time and he’s sick and I’m just worried.”
In my thirties when I was wanting a baby but my husband wasn’t, I got a lot of advice to just quit taking the pill and he’d never know the difference but I couldn’t do that. I also didn’t want to be a single mother if it turned out that he wouldn’t be thrilled as everyone thought but would actually leave me.
Since that time I have counseled women to have a baby no matter if they are partnered or not, because I waited too long to try. But I feel for the single mother, the one who is everything to everybody, and I wish that we had more daycare and after hour care options so that their life would not be so hard.
Another friend stopped by trick or treating – her baby in the stroller was born the same time our baby girl was due (June 8), I was looking at him and thinking that our child might be that age right now in wonderment and my friend said that for three weeks she was training a nanny who will be caring for her 4 year old and her baby so that she can go back to work and that she felt like she had finally found the perfect harmony of being a mother – the nanny was there and she was untethered and my friend could go have lunch with her mom and play with the kids and not feel stress or pressure.
Let’s all stop right now and give thanks to those single mom’s who never have a moment like that.