Sticks and Stars

Yesterday morning I was talking to a coworker who lives in an intentional community. I always have a million questions for her because I have long been fascinated by intentional communities and have secret (and not so secret) dreams of joining one (I can’t recall whether I blogged about my boys’ dad and I actually starting the process toward membership at a rural intentional community in the south). I was telling her about how I once posted to this (annoying) single moms email list that I belong to, telling about my dream to rent an apartment building and form an intentional community of other single moms, and how my post garnered a big response of, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and “That would never work,” and, “Women just can’t live together!”

As I was telling the story and she was telling me about a friend of hers who’s also a single mom who has dreams similar to mine, I started thinking about that term, “single mom,” and I realized that I really don’t care for it anymore.

I used to like the term. Or maybe like is too strong a word, but I felt comfortable nestling inside it, I felt like it fit. It was a term that suggested suffering and strife and stress and strain and damnit, I wanted people to know about my suffering and strife and stress and strain! I felt like I could call myself a single mom with a small sigh and eyes cast downward and people would tsk accordingly and feel sorry for me and the unfair burdens piled on my frail, frail shoulders. A tear comes to my eye just thinking about that tragic, tragic picture of me standing strong against so much adversity.

God I was noble.

These days the term makes me cringe a little, perhaps for the same reasons. I feel quite happy with this life I find myself living and I feel quite proud of the work I’ve done to get here, and I feel excited about what the future will bring. When I look at myself and my life I feel big and strong and I hate the thought of people thinking of me as “just” a single mom and squelching me down into that little pitiable box.

Of course, I’m a mother. Mothering is a big part of my life, maybe the biggest part because it kind of shapes all the other parts, but it’s still just a part. And of course, I’m also single, but is that so bizarre that it needs its own label? Do people otherwise go about tagging their relationship status to their various identifiers? Must we always be partnered or striving to be to the extent that those of us who are unpartnered must advertise ourselves thus?

The longer I stay single, the more I like it, and surprisingly (or maybe not), the more whole I feel as a person. When my boys’ dad and I first broke up I definitely felt like a big piece of my life had been torn away and there was this huge, raw hole. His mom warned me that I should find someone new soon so that I didn’t become too independent and I certainly can see that risk (ha ha). These days I feel very disinclined to get myself into a relationship. I want to make friends and I want to be a part of a community, but I’m much more cautious about dating and romantic involvement. The more I spend time growing my whole self, the more I “heal,” the less I feel the need for some all encompassing relationship. And that’s good. I have a long history of placing my relationship at the center of my life and trying to make it fill all the empty spots in me. Hell, I feel like most of us do that. But the longer I spend alone, the more I find ways to fill those empty spots all by myself and I feel more complete as a result.

There are definitely times when I feel lonely and feel like I want a relationship, any relationship. But then I think about concrete people with whom I could involve myself and I realize that I don’t want “any” relationship, I don’t really want a relationship at all, I just don’t want to be lonely. And there are better cures for loneliness than shackling myself to someone else.

So yeah. I’m a mother. I happen to be single. But I don’t really feel like a Single Mother anymore. I just feel like an independent woman accompanied by two small children, who’s learning and growing and making her way in the world and helping her children to do the same. We aren’t beleaguered, we aren’t downtrodden, we shouldn’t be pitied. We are doing pretty well.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 7:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.