Social Injustice and Other Public Atrocities of Single Parenthood
Sitting on the sofa with my daughter, I thought about the simplicity of life and how often we miss the key components of joy that come with every moment of brutal reality. We’d been talking about the joys of motherhood and how much we both enjoyed the phases of parenthood we’d experienced. The coming birth of her son had instigated the conversation, but there was a much deeper underlying quality in the communication that kept us both silent during much of the conversation.
Abandonment.
Single mothers have a common thread. No matter how hard we try to play the strong single parent, knowing exactly where to go from “here”, there’s always that heart felt hurt of abandonment that threads itself into our lives. Are we not worthy…
There’s so much of the day-to-day reality that isn’t part of the strength and power we’d like everyone to see in our lives, and yet… the majority of our lives are filled to the brim with strength.
We know the value of love, because we know how much we love our children. But quite honestly, as women, we’ve never received that kind of love. No matter how much we desire to feel loved, cared for and appreciated, and no matter how long we were married before we became single again, there’s a knowledge inside that we didn’t quite measure up some how. We weren’t quite worthy of finding the one thing in life that would have made life worth living to the fullest. We make wonderful mother’s because we GIVE love unconditionally. But, we never quite found the one man designed to love us unconditionally.
Social injustice? Public atrocity? An embarrassment to the womanhood?
Who knows. The reality is, we feel unloved, no matter how many times we are told “I love you.” Single moms often have many friends, many male friends who say all the right things. Often we even have friends who “would have married us had the stars all been aligned on the right day” but, the reality is, we never have had one man who would wait until we were available, care for us beyond all others and appreciate us for the wonderful women we are, forsaking all others and loving only us.
My daughter shared a conversation she’d had with a friend of mine. He’d loved my children so much that he wanted to marry me and give them the kind of father they deserved…
I listened to the story and laughed to cover my broken heart.
I too, want someone to love my children, and since their father obviously didn’t love them enough to stick around and be a father to them… the concept of having someone else love them enough to “be there” for them through thick, thin, and frustrating.
But, the broken heart was the part my daughter and I shared in silence. “What about me?” I wanted to shout, “Am I not worthy of being loved in such a magnificent manner that a man would love my children because they are an extension of me?”
I’ve long since quit searching for the “perfect man” and started living my life, knowing simply that if there is a man out there, he’ll appear in God’s time. I love my life. I love my children. I live in a world created for loving and caring, a world of family where loving is part of the process of each and every day. It may be a social injustice, or even a public atrocity. But it’s more likely to be just another day in the life of single parenthood.
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