Member-only story
Single Mom Shaming
The morning I woke up to it…
The other day, I woke up with a realization that wasn’t pretty. I realized that there had been many times in my life that I had talked down about single moms. And here I was, after so many years of marriage. I was one of them.
I had seen friends move states away with their kids to live with their parents after divorce. I had seen them leave their children and make a life somewhere else (often with another man), and then come back for them, after a year or so. I had seen them move in with the first boyfriend they had after divorcing. Sometimes, it would be just months after leaving their husbands.
I never ever understood this until now. And do I ever get it. Sadly, my divorce left me with 20 times the debt that I have in income right now. I am in school, trying to focus, and failing to do so, on a regular basis. There is absolutely no financial stability to be found. Not now, nor in the near future. This realization was like a slap in the face.
I wake up, with my heart racing every day. Sometimes I am crying, too. It is the most exhausting thing in the world to put things into perspective. I am supposed to be studying full time, but I take 10 hours a day, just to scrape by. It is ridiculous.
