Feminist Advice Friday: I'm about to give birth as a single mother. How can I make this a good experience?
A reader worries that, if married motherhood is hard without help, single motherhood will be even harder.
A reader asks…
I’m about to have a baby. Now, I never wanted a baby - not because I don’t like kids, but because I never met a mother I wanted to trade lives with. I never met one who wasn’t stressed out, overwhelmed and overworked. I never met one who seemed to have anything remotely close to equality of labour and effort in their marriage. I didn’t want to give up everything I loved to do and be just to be house keeper and child minder to a man who was allowed to continue and keep everything he loved to do, whose life remained largely unchanged.
I became pregnant to a man who I was in a very casual relationship with, who told me he’d had a vasectomy. (For the record, I don’t believe he lied to me - he’s not a stupid man, and lying about something like that is VERY stupid. It’s a lie you’re going to get caught out in.) I’ve always been a staunch believer in women’s right to termination, and always believed that that’s what I would do if I ever became pregnant. However, once it happened, I realised that choosing not to get pregnant and choosing to end the life already growing inside you are two very different things, and it was not a choice I was able to make for myself.
The man has chosen to play no further role in my life, or that of my baby. I’m not sorry- he would be a terrible, selfish co-parent who would only add to my stress, he wouldn’t take any stress away from me. I made the choice to keep the baby knowing full well I would be a single parent from the start.
So, to my question. Your page tells us so much what we’re entitled to as parents in an equal relationship. It tells us that maternal exhaustion and struggle is not inevitable, it is a choice men make. But when you know you’re going to be doing everything alone, when you don’t have a partner to even make that choice to share the load, when you KNOW the entire load will fall on you, how do you avoid that inevitable-seeming maternal exhaustion and overwhelm? I love my unborn baby already and I want to give him/her a good life and be a good mother, but looking down the barrel of the reality of having to parent a newborn alone (potentially while recovering from a C-section), to raise a toddler alone - things which are challenging enough for two people who love and support each other - I don’t know how I’m going to do it and come out the other side happy and sane.
My Answer:
Congratulations! Motherhood can be a wonderful experience. It will change and challenge you. I found that labor broke me open and reshaped me into something completely different. I hope you find the process powerfully transformative as well.
First, I want to give you the basic advice that I give all expectant mothers:
Learn as much as you can about childbirth and the birth industrial complex, so you can reduce your risk of a traumatic birth. Hire a doula, no matter what type of birth you hope to have.
Sleep is going to be difficult. I promise you it will get better, no matter what you do, and even if you do nothing. Don’t listen to people who tell you it doesn’t get easier. They’re lying to you.
Spend lots of time planning for the postpartum period. You will need food, and help, and supplies. Write down a postpartum plan just like you might write a birth plan.
Everything gets easier after the newborn and toddler periods. You will have time to yourself again, I promise. But it’s going to be a while.
Readers, I invite you to share your own tried-and-true parenting tips.
Now, onto the meat of your question:
Motherhood is physically and emotionally demanding work. There’s no getting around that. But our culture is what makes motherhood so exhausting and demoralizing. It does not have to be this way, and I doubt it has been for most of human history.
I recently learned about the concept of eustress. Eustress is stress that is good for you—the stress of exercise, of a puzzle, of a solvable problem at work. It improves your health and makes you smarter over time. Motherhood can be a major source of eustress if you have the right supports in place.
For married heterosexual women, though, it’s more typically a source of distress because the struggles they encounter stem from inequity and oppression. If you’re not living with a partner who wants to buy his leisure with your misery, you’re already much more likely to experience beneficial eustress from the challenges of motherhood.
Household labor inequity isn’t just about not getting enough help. It’s about men actually making things worse than they would be if they weren’t present.
The data tell us that the average husband adds 7 hours of work to his wife’s workload. You are starting out of the gate with 7 hours less of work than your peers. That’s a pretty significant advantage.
There are other aspects of single motherhood that are going to be better for you, too. You will never have to worry about coparenting with someone who actively undermines you. You’ll get to make your own parenting decisions. You won’t have to worry about someone’s mess, or about the harmful things he tells your child.
You absolutely can do this, and I think that if you set yourself up for success, single motherhood can actually be easier. But I want you to have realistic expectations. Motherhood is tough, and the more you can do to build your support system, the better off you will be. Can you tighten friendships you already have with other single mothers? Ask your parents for help? Get to know your neighbors? Motherhood brings people together in remarkable ways. It can help you make new friends. Let that happen, and lean on these reltionships to get you through the hard times.
I urge you to connect with the organization Single Mothers by Choice, which has support groups across the globe. The single mothers I know have found the organization to be fertile soil for community and support.
You’re going to need childcare. Begin looking now. The more time you can devote to this search, the more likely you are to find a solution that feels trustworthy.
Finally, I want to urge you in the strongest possible terms to consult a family lawyer to make sure you understand your rights. The very last thing you want is for this man to pop back up in your life 10 years down the road and intrude upon the happy life you’ve made with your child. I don’t know what the right thing to do is legally, but a good lawyer will.
Please keep me updated. It’s going to be a wild ride, but I assure you it can also be an amazing one.
I publish #feministadvicefriday every Friday(ish) here and on Facebook. You can submit your own question to zawn.villines@gmail.com, by messaging my Facebook page, or anonymously by using my site’s contact form.