At 28 years old I became a mother. Hands down the best thing that has happened to me, then and now. Even today, four years later I love being able to sit out on the back deck of my house on a fall day and watch my daughter sing at the top of her lungs while playing on her swing set as I write a blog. As a person, being a mom has challenged, helped me grow, and developed me into a much more complete version of myself. Being a mother is the greatest joy, the greatest gift I have ever known.
At 28 years old I became a single mother. That to me unpacks a whole load of other emotions. I did not plan my pregnancy, though I always have been very maternal and looked forward to the day I would have a family. At that point in my life I was not married and it was not on my radar. I have always been a very responsible, mature, conservative, “make the right decisions” type. I immediately became fearful that all of those qualities that made me me would no longer be valid to those whole surrounded me and especially to those who did not know me. I became embodied by many fears that the stereotypical “single mom” identity would over-shadow me. That it would not matter that I had a Master’s degree, a career, a saving account, a strong faith, or that I had been in a stable relationship. I would be judged.
For many months and years after having Adelynn this shadow continued to stay with me. I felt the need to prove more to people, to be more successful, to be an all present mother…to be all the things that I classified “married moms” to be. I rarely corrected people when they called me “Mrs.” or referred to my “husband” and not because I was just being polite but because I believed they would make unfair assumptions about me if they knew otherwise. I believed and knew I was a good mom. I knew I was providing for my daughter, nurturing her, developing her in the way that was best. I just simply felt that if people knew I was an unwed mother that I would carry a “less than value” in their eyes. I equated in many ways the term “single mom” to be all the qualities that I certainly was not; I was not an irresponsible person, I was not an uneducated person, and I was not a selfish or self-indulged person. I did not want to in anyway be associated with those characteristics.
I would like to say that there was this one event or one thing that helped me realize the irrational and untruth of this fear but there was not. It has been a journey that I have taken over the past few years. In many ways, I realized that most of my perceived judgment came from myself and not others. I began focusing on what has made me a great mother to Adelynn instead of the ways that I thought I was not living-up to what I thought “motherhood” should look like. I also started listening and actually believing when people that I loved affirmed me as a mother.
Many of you reading may be single mothers or you might not be; but I have begun to realize that many of us fight this inner battle. We hold on to some fear about ourselves, our decisions, our presentation to the outside world. We worry that others will not be able to see the real us because we are scarred by something else. Moms, I’m speaking to you when I say this: it’s just not true. What is true is who you are in the eyes of your daughter, in the eyes of your son. What is true is that I am a loving, nurturing, encouraging, growing, inspiring, hard-working, dedicated and single mom.
