Single motherhood.



Since coming to college, I have learned that my experiences growing up were far from the norm. My of my friends grew up inside a nuclear family with a puppy to match, but that was not the case for me. To summarize my childhood existence, I attended school at a private, Catholic elementary school which taught me all about the love and support one receives from marriage. They also taught me that divorce was bad. My demystification, if you will, of my education and the culture around me all started in second grade when my parents got divorced.

From then on, my life consisted of carting around my life twice a week to spend shared custody with my parents. I love my dad and spent a significant amount of my childhood with him, but for the purposes of this blog I want to focus on my mom. Jane Juffer, author of Single Mother: The Emergence of the Domestic Individual writes much of her book on the single mother and how they are represented in society. While reading this, I found myself vigorously shaking my head yes throughout most of Chapters 1 and 2 where Juffer further explains the network between mother and child. 

My mom, much like Juffer, held a full time job while I was growing up. I spent hours in daycare after school when my mother was busy being a director of a mental health services center. While in 4th-6th grade, I didn't see my mother on Mondays and Wednesdays, she was busy getting her masters degree in Mental Health Administration. Juffer states that "single mothers are household managers as well as business entrepreneurs, showing the intersections rather than the exclusion of those realms".  My mom was busy raising three children, heading a household, working full time, and getting educated all at the same time, trying to live her own life. All the while, she was being misrepresented in our society. 

Fortunately, many people understand how good of a mother and woman she is, and many of her friends go out of their way to tell me how lucky I am to have her as a mom, but she still struggled while raising us because her work did not have child care assistance and she had to make ends meet with only one salary. Not to mention, me and my sisters were only in her custody a little over half the time, so when we were with her, she had to balance work, school, and the desire to spend all her time with her children. 


Juffer states that single mothers constantly question their parenting, asking themselves "how much of my child's identity is a product of these transitions, this living arrangement?" I think I have come a long way from believing what my religion teacher was preaching to me in elementary school that the only way to live a happy life is in a marriage. My mom definitely struggled to make her way, and me as her child was definitely affected by it, but I think seeing her constantly overcoming struggles to help her children is inspiring. I think I have become a hard worker because of watching her. I have also learned never to complain about work load in front of her. 


My mother, like Jane Juffer millions of other single mothers all over the world are continuing to use agency to change the misrepresentation of the phrase 'single mother'. This lifestyle might not have been what my mother initially thought she was getting herself into, but I'll be the first to say she has done a damn good job at it.