We got this, p.1
We Got This, page 1
Praise for We Got This
“Remember when adults asked your younger self, ‘Who’s your hero?’ and you named your favorite president or pop star? After reading We Got This, I dare you not to revisit that question. The 75 diverse single mothers in this extraordinary collection have married their fierce love for their children with their fierce skills as writers. Their voices whisper and bellow, protest and rejoice, hum and sing. Collectively, they announce: single moms are our unsung heroes.”
—Alma Gottlieb, coauthor of A World of Babies:
Imagined Childcare Guides for Eight Societies
“We Got This is fierce love meets fear meets wonder. I savored these poems and essays, which are full of humor and heartbreak, wisdom and humanity. These pieces will help any mother—single or not—to feel inspired and supported, seen and understood, as she navigates this tremendous thing called motherhood.”
—Kate Hopper, author of Ready for Air: A Journey Through
Premature Motherhood and Use Your Words:
A Writing Guide for Mothers
“The voices in We Got This are touching, vulnerable, hilarious, insightful, bold, strong, resilient, and brilliant. Whether you are facing single motherhood, you are a single mom, or you love one, this book is a mirror to the special life experience of solo mothering—and solo thriving.”
—Emma Johnson, founder, Wealthysinglemommy.com, and
author of The Kickass Single Mom
“We Got This is a reunion of survivors. No ‘how-to’ here, just a loving village of women who have been there, who are still there, and who reach out a hand to you, single mom, to help you get your bearings. Within these pages, you will find encouraging strength and the promise of finding your own joy.”
—M. M. De Voe, founder, director, Pen Parentis, Ltd.
“Isolated, scared, sad, and hopeless are some of the emotions I felt when I was going through my divorce eleven years ago. I had two small children and no family living near me, and I had never felt so alone. I wish I could have read We Got This back then. Reading this book made me feel like I had friends, women who understand me, who care about me, and who are here for me, and like no matter what, everything is going to be OK!”
—Jackie Pilossoph, creator, Divorced Girl Smiling, and “Love
Essentially” columnist for Chicago Tribune Media Group
“The collection of stories in We Got This is a beautifully crafted testament to the universe of solo motherhood that connects women who feel like strangers, in the most intimate of ways.”
—Deborah Gruenfeld, professor and codirector, Executive
Program in Women’s Leadership, Stanford University
“We Got This is a terrific collection of voices of solo moms—and their kids. The laments and triumphs of these mothers filled me with awe and laughter, and made me proud to belong to the human race.”
—Sari Wilson, author of Girl Through Glass
“We Got This brings hope, light, joy, and humor to the seemingly dark road of being a solo mom—a job that we often don’t choose and that we can’t quit. The stories shared in this collection brought me great joy because they are heartfelt depictions of the solo mom reality. Go get yourself a copy. You will be glad you did.”
—Noelle Federico, business consultant and founder,
Theworkingsinglemom.com
Copyright © 2019, edited by Marika Lindholm, Cheryl Dumesnil, Domenica Ruta, and Katherine Shonk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
Published 2019
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-63152-656-5 pbk
ISBN: 978-1-63152-657-2 ebk
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939483
For information, address:
She Writes Press 1569 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707
She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.
Interior design by Tabitha Lahr
All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.
Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.
Editors’ note: Throughout, capitalization of races/ethnicities reflects authors’ personal preferences.
Contents
Introduction
Marika Lindholm
CHAPTER ONE: THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
The Road
Teresa Mei Chuc
You Were Born to Be Loved
Domenica Ruta
from The Light of the World: A Memoir
Elizabeth Alexander
When One Door Closes, Another One Opens
Terri Linton
Notes to My Autistic Daughter
Marianne Peel Forman
I Was the Different One
Nisa Rashid
Return
Dorianne Laux
Teaching My Son to Write: An Abecedarian
Stacia Fleegal
It’s Really Not a Big Deal
Jacob Kronenberg
An Open Letter to Our Sperm Donor
Robin Silbergleid
Dad Day: Death Is a Holiday
Lennlee Keep
How to Pray
Sage Cohen
Butterfly and Sunshine
Marika Lindholm
CHAPTER TWO: LEAN ON ME
Finding My Voice, Feeding My Friends
Janelle Hardy
For My Sisters
Sharisse Kimbro
from A Beautiful, Terrible Thing
Jen Waite
Raising a Boy without a Man
Kathleen Laccinole
September 17
Anne Lamott
Prayer
Keetje Kuipers
The Godfather
Margot Kessler
the lost women
Lucille Clifton
We Are Loved
Amy Rivers
XIII
Adrienne Rich
Tahlequah
Isa Down
All the Single Ladies
Jennifer Baumgardner
CHAPTER THREE: A DAY IN THE LIFE
When a Car Wreck Collides with Picking Up the Kids
Melissa Stephenson
How to Comfort a Small Child
Abby Murray
Rules for Being Twenty
Ariel Gore
Evening Guilt
Kristie Robin Johnson
I’m the Woman Who Hit Your Daughter with My Car
Courtney Christine
Life after the NICU
Sarah Netter
My Life as a Refugee
Faleeha Hassan
The Rookie
January Gill O’Neil
This Is Your Life
Fern Capella
Crying It Out
Robin Silbergleid
They Give Awards for That
Lee Nash
CHAPTER FOUR: GOOD MORNING HEARTACHE
Why We Stay
VersAnnette Blackman-Bosia
When He Died
Robin Rogers
This Lesson I Know My Boy Already Knows
Georgia Pearle
from The Light of the World: A Memoir
Elizabeth Alexander
Then
Ruth Stone
When Black Lives Matter More Than You Ever Imagined
Deborah Oster Pannell
In a Quiet Moment
Hilary Melton
Heroin, Rain
Anne Spollen
On Home
Lisa Fay Coutley
What I Will Tell His Daughter, When She’s Old Enough to Ask
Meg Day
Grey Street
Angela Ricketts
CHAPTER FIVE: A CHANGE IS GONNA COME
Now That I Am Forever with Child
Audre Lorde
Coming Out Pregnant!
Staceyann Chin
The Story, for Now
Janlori Goldman
Myths of Botany and Motherhood
Isa Down
Gravity
Kim Addonizio
The Nervous Hospital
Mary Karr
What Remains
Jaimie Seaton
It Will Look Like a Sunset
Kelly Sundberg
Cicadas
Rachel Jamison Webster
My Books on Divorce
Amy Poehler
Today, I Am Mostly Crying
Claire Gillespie
CHAPTER SIX: ISN’T IT ROMANTIC?
Size Queen
Evie Peck
All Manner of Obscene Things
Kim Addonizio
Origami Wishes
Akesha Baron
How My Daughter Taught Me to Trust Again
Rachel Sarah
Personals
Muriel Johnson
Kaboom
Susan Goldberg
I Don’t Want Your Husband
P. Charlotte Lindsay
How to Love
January Gill O’Neil
You Can’t “Und
Jessica Bern
I Ask the Impossible
Ana Castillo
CHAPTER SEVEN: HERE COMES THE SUN
Yeah, But
Cheryl Dumesnil
My Birth, My Way
Cate Morrissey
How I Came to Me
Malaika King Albrecht
Teacher and Teammate
Sarah Kowalski
The Sky Is Everywhere
Nancy Sharp
Divorce Cliché
Shannon Lell
Sunday
January Gill O’Neil
Why I Don’t Grieve for My Daughter at College
Ylonda Gault
Deconstructing Kanji
Mika Yamamoto
After He Left
Jeanie Tomasko
I’d Loved Before, but Never Like This
asha bandele
Contributors
Permissions and Acknowledgments
Introduction
Hey Mama,
Almost two decades ago, when my children were three and five, I went through a painful and difficult divorce. As a sociologist specializing in gender issues, I thought I had a handle on the challenges ahead. Not so! During my first year as a solo mom, I was often sick, stressed, and lonely. Like most moms who go through a divorce, I felt tremendous guilt, my finances suffered, and friends who were uncomfortable with my new identity drifted away. Our family of three ultimately found joy in our small apartment, where I slept on the couch, but those early years of solo motherhood convinced me that single mothers unequivocally need more support, more empathy, and more praise. That’s why in 2015, I founded Empowering Solo Moms Everywhere (ESME) to build a helpful and informative community for single moms (who, in America alone, are currently raising fifteen million children). Inspired by ESME, We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart, and Humor is a love letter from our community of solo moms who want you to know that you are not alone. Your tenacity, resilience, and grit are worthy of celebration.
Too often, single mothers are voiceless or misrepresented in a sea of stereotypes, accusations, and shame. My coeditors—Cheryl, Domenica, and Katie—and I take great pride in sharing poems, essays, and quotes that reflect the diversity of single motherhood while affirming the collective challenges and rewards of parenting alone. The stories in We Got This come from divorced moms, widows, military moms, single moms by choice, and single moms by surprise. They come from moms of all ages raising kids of all ages. Our authors represent a range of ethnicities, economic circumstances, sexual orientations, and beliefs. The chapters in We Got This blend humor, gravitas, pride, and hope as they progress through the many themes of solo motherhood: “The Kids Are Alright” (raising children), “Lean on Me” (finding support), “A Day in the Life” (everyday challenges), “Good Morning Heartache” (a difficult shift in identity), “A Change Is Gonna Come” (growth and resilience), “Isn’t It Romantic?” (dating), and “Here Comes the Sun” (hope and optimism). We Got This amplifies the voices of single moms in all our gorgeous variations, celebrating who we are and what we do.
Like the songs that inspire each chapter, the solo mom stories we’ve selected resonate through honesty and revelation. From a military spouse suffering a heart attack while her husband is deployed to a mom who “lost” her spouse to mental illness, these voices draw us in with confidence and grace. Written by authors ranging from well-known to yet-to-be-discovered, these poems and essays are beautifully crafted and speak to both the head and the heart. The array of feelings these writers express—yearning, melancholy, hope, strength, shame, regret, fear, ferocity, bravery, rebellion, anticipation, longing, rapture, and triumph—remind us that a solo mom’s journey is, by necessity, contradictory. Society undervalues us and offers paltry support, yet due to fierce love for our children, we display bravery and strength again and again.
We hope, after you read the stories in We Got This, that you feel like you’ve just had a conversation with a group of friends who get it—the kind of friends who recognize your strength and mirror it back to you. By the end of the book, we want readers to see that, as we say at ESME, “Solo doesn’t mean alone.” We are part of a community of resilient women who, despite hardship and some pain, can thrive and find joy as solo moms. We dedicate this book to all of you who love unconditionally, always show up, find humor in difficult situations, get back up after you fall, defy the odds, and accomplish the impossible, day after day, year after year.
We see you. We hear you. And we know you got this!
Much love,
Marika
Chapter One: The Kids Are Alright
My brother and I grew up in the projects. But through my mother’s emphasis on education, we are living wonderful, full lives, liberated from the shackles of poverty.
—Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor
The Road
Teresa Mei Chuc
I say my children are
like lightning bugs.
I see how they
glow in the dark.
Sometimes, it is
the only light I see.
You Were Born to Be Loved
Domenica Ruta
It is a Sunday morning gleaming with possibility, and I don’t want to leave our apartment. You are staring out the window at the chiseled skyline of Manhattan, the Empire State Building a tiny spear poking up in the center, the elevated track of the subway rushing past every seven minutes, to your endless delight. The sun is gaping, ready, invincible. I have never been more tired.
There should be a new word for solo mom exhaustion. It’s an accumulated sleep deficit that warps the mind beyond recognition. Only medical students, soldiers, and certain drug addicts could compare notes. For the first few months you were here, so tiny and wrinkled, nothing but eyes and hair more closely resembling fur, day and night became indistinguishable to me, and I did not close my eyes long enough to have dreams. I got little sips of sleep: forty-five minutes here, then up again to feed you, another hour there, if I was lucky; naps, really, all of them too short to check into that hotel of magic where all the garbage of the mind, the fear and anxiety, is sorted into compost.
But every so-called morning, I got up with a surge of love and adrenaline. We had days I don’t remember now, but pray I will see again in the moments before I die. Because they were wonderful. You were wonderful. And so I get up this morning, too, like all the others, to play with you.
Mornings with my own solo mom were very different when I was a child. My mother was almost always too hungover to get up and play with me—to get up at all. I don’t remember those mornings well, either—only the bleary mood they evoke. Like the exhaustion I feel now, there is no singular word that can accurately define it: a strange intersection of loneliness and physical hunger, longing, and fear, a feeling as real as a punch in the stomach and the emptiness that follows it. Those childhood mornings, a realm of solitude lived alongside a sleeping body, my mother unwakeable as a corpse, sent me deep into my imagination for entertainment and consolation, for better and for worse. I climbed the cabinets in search of food when I was a toddler no bigger than you. There was no telling when she would wake to feed me. Even when she did finally get up sometime in the afternoon, awake but not, there was no guarantee she would stay very long. The urge to get high again pulled her away from me.
Looking at us now—you, needing a good hair brushing and a bath; me, unwilling to take you anywhere that requires me to wear a bra—I wonder, are we so much better off? But this is ridiculous, a slip into self-loathing greased by exhaustion. Because of course we are! My mother was a hardened drug addict, and I am several years clean and sober. I got sober for my own good, years before you were a possibility. Now I stay sober for us both, one day at a time. After you got all your shots, I’d take you to the church basements where the alcoholics meet. Everyone would fight over who got to hold you next, while my shoulders ached in that brief moment of weightlessness.
But this weekend is my weekend with you, an alternating bimonthly holiday I put too much pressure on. I should take you to the zoo. I should take a shower. I should be giving you a more enriching experience of this Sunday. I’m so, so tired.
You have taken every single toy off your shelves and scattered them across the apartment. Our kitchen floor is a sprawling miniature parking lot of racecars and bulldozers. You’re getting cranky, on the verge of a nap—something you so desperately need, even more than I do—but you’re fighting it, like you always do. To make you laugh, I find the wooden animals of your two different jungle-themed puzzles and stand them up in a little menagerie. I make introductions, like at a dinner party, with the giraffe from one puzzle greeting the giraffe from the other puzzle.
