Who gets to call herself a 'single mom?' The term is not as straightforward as you think. Single moms by choice, a divorced single mom, a military wife, and more weigh in on what it means to be 'single,' as a parent.
Dana Robinson, who, like me, had a child out of wedlock following a short-lived relationship, finds the phrase "single mom" itself pretty irksome. Single mom, though, “implies that the alternative is 'coupled mom,' like relationships and parenting are necessarily a packaged deal," she wrote via email.
"It strips the woman of her agency and attempts to invalidate the notion that motherhood outside of a relationship is a choice women can make." This presumed lack of agency is extra-ridiculous, as Robinson, who became a mom a few months before I did, has long been a source of inspiration for me. She’s a foodie who cooks amazing meals and bought an amazing house in Detroit, where she and her 4-year-old daughter Darby live. I rent the one-bedroom apartment I share with Ruby, and order a lot of Seamless . It takes an extra layer of preparation to become a Single Mom By Choice, that is to say, a mom who actively proceeds to become a solo parent via artificial insemination or adoption. Aubrey Sabala froze her eggs in New York and took them with her when she moved to Atlanta to a house, dog, and then — three months ago — a beautiful baby girl she named Elodie. As an SVP at a digital marketing agency, Sabala was in a position to plan for Elodie's arrival. "I'm an only child, and all of my family is out of town," she explained via email. "So I do have to pay for help, but I knew that going in." Sabala booked a, and has a nanny lined up for when she returns to work in a few weeks, and a daycare picked out for a few months thereafter. "I'm just happy I didn't settle for and with the wrong person to become a mom," she says.Veteran TV producer Josanne Lopez had a whole different slate of preparations to make before adopting her daughter 12 years ago, both to navigate the byzantine adoption process and then to figure out how to work after her daughter arrived. "I walked into this knowing that, okay, I'm going to have go into producer mode to sort of figure out the things that I needed to make parenting work. And most of them were mechanical," Lopez says. When she launched her talent management business, Lopez Talent, the planning took on an extra dimension. She recalls thinking: "If I'm going to launch this business I'm going to have to make it so that the business is run out of my home, so that I could see my daughter more and set parameters around when my business day began and when it ended." She also calculated "the money I would have to carve out of my life and my daughter's life so that I could have the support I needed." A common theme when talking to single moms is not the lack of physical help per se — changing diapers isn't hard — but how unrelenting solo parenting can be. I remember being crushed by decision fatigue when Ruby was a baby, when every choice was mine and they all seemed so weighty. Was it safe to bathe her alone? Should I swaddle her even though her arm kept getting free? Was I a monster for wanting to co-sleep? At a certain point even choosing her outfits felt overwhelming. This is the main piece that the erstwhile single-moms-for-a-blink miss: An out-of-town partner is still a partner, in childrearing, decision-making, and of course, bill-paying. "You're not making life decisions independently in those two, three, four days that you're 'single momming it,’" says Lopez. "You're not making mega-decisions independently that also will create a financial situation in your household." And while there's no doubt that spending time alone with irritatingly free-willed children can tax one to the breaking point, that's still not being a single parent. Skurnick recalls a father who proclaimed himself a single dad while his wife was away on business, and complained about how hard it was for him to get his two kids into their snowsuits. "If your difficulty is that you had to get two kids into snowsuits on a snowy day, this has nothing to do with being single or not being single," she says. "You just don't understand snowsuits." The other common theme is money. Parenting solo for a few days doesn't stop the flow of cash in a dual-income household, nor permanently remove one of two labor-performing adults. Jennifer Justice, an NYC-based lawyer and former music exec, had twins on her own via donor five years ago, and is keenly aware that the buck stops with her. "When you add the stress of being a sole breadwinner, then it's a whole different dimension," she says. "Because that is fucking stressful."Tuesday-evening class
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