I am happier as a single mother than as a married mother. Despite 47% of Americans think single mothers are bad for society. Becoming one made my life and my children's lives so much better. This became clear to me during the COVID-19 shutdown, when my children were in third grade and kindergarten and Zoom school often brought all three of us to tears. He was earning near-poverty-level wages, still trying to get out of divorce and cost-of-living debt.
At one point, a friend texted me to ask how things were going. “I can't imagine enduring this pandemic as a single mother,” he said.
I took a breath and looked around my house. Light streamed in through the windows and my cat slept on my lap. He was working hard, exhausted and scared. But he was also very happy because for the first time in my life he had the space to do the work he loved.
Court-ordered 50/50 custody meant my ex was doing his share of online schooling and parenting. My friend's husband had been ignoring his kids to focus on his sourdough project. The following year, she, too, was a single mother.
Single mothers have been blamed for everything, including crime rates, school shootings and poverty. Alone and without a man, they are the specter of our cultural anxiety. People wring their hands and wonder who their children will admire without husbands around. As if children could not love and admire their mothers and see them as models for humanity.
Single mothers are more likely than married women to be poor and face the pressures of the wage gap and lack of affordable child care and health care in the U.S. But single mothers themselves are not the cause of these deficiencies; We are simply a byproduct.
Although I chose to be a single mother, our society often fails to recognize that many single parents were forced into that situation due to issues such as abusive partners, incarceration, and lack of reproductive rights. Single mothers are easy scapegoats for problems they did not create. They push us into poverty because of systemic problems and then blame us for it.
In “The plan to save America,” in the Republican Study Committee’s June 2022 fiscal report, the group repeatedly emphasizes that marriage and family should be the focus of government spending rather than the social safety net. The report argues that being a single parent (specifically a single mother, since they never mention single parents) is what tends to lead to poverty. The solution? Forcing people to marry in the name of fiscal responsibility. This follows a pattern: The Moynihan Report 1965 and George W. Bush Healthy Marriage Initiative He also pushed for women and mothers to marry, rather than advocating for funding a social safety net.
But often going from single motherhood to marriage is like going from a cage to a slightly larger one. Reports slandering single mothers are ubiquitous, but we rarely consider that marriage itself may be a form of cheating. For example, Husbands add seven hours of housework per week to their wives, while the wife reduces her husband's work by one hour a week. Besides, Nearly 20% of American marriages involve some form of physical violence. emotional abuse being even more frequent. Women do more raising children and further adapting their careers to accommodate family and de facto couples. And there is a lot of evidence that supports the idea that divorced women are happier. Not to mention that single mothers have more free time and sleep more than their married counterparts.
It doesn't surprise me that single mothers are seen as something negative for society. Free women are destabilizing. Her existence, her radical happiness, disrupts our cultural ideas about what love and family should be like. I'm glad that's the way it is.
As a single mother, I have been forced to build a new kind of life. I own my own house and I have filled it with pets, books and friends. I do less housework than when I was married. I realize that part of this is the privilege of being able to find a job that pays my mortgage and puts food on the table. But part of it is the equality I gained through 50/50 custody, which gave me time to work, something I never had when I was shouldering most of the physical and emotional labor during my marriage.
The experiences of single motherhood are vast and diverse. When I was broke and struggling in the early days of being a single mother, I reminded myself that I had been poor before. But what he had never been was free. And in 2024, that seems radical.
Lyz Lenz is a mother, journalist and author. Her new book, “This American ex-wife”, will be published on Tuesday.
