An Essay of Survival as a Single Parent

I remember when I first became a single parent. I was extremely overwhelmed. I was angry at people who I perceived to have simpler lives, lives where they had help from either a spouse or family. I was alone. Alone with a life dependent on me, a child who assumed I would take care of her. At the time, I wasn’t all that sure I could take care of myself. I made barely over minimum wage. I lived in a tenement building in New England where winter winds blew right through my apartment and would blow out the pilot of the gas space heater, leaving the inside of the apartment cold enough to see your breath.

So what was there for me to do? I had two choices: wallow in self-pity, allowing single parenting to break me, or learn to light the heater. I learned to light the heater.

This tenement building was across the street from a church, which hosted Bingo several times a week. When church or bingo was in session, I couldn’t park anywhere near the apartment. Often I would be toting baskets of laundry home from the Laundromat, and when I finally found a parking place a block or two away I would carry my laundry and chase my two-year-old, feeling sorry for myself at every step.

All the while, in my head I heard the phrase over and over, “I can’t do this alone.” In short, I didn't want to be a single parent.

But guess what? I did do it alone. I learned to trust myself and to depend on myself more than anyone else in the world. It was a slow, painful metamorphosis. I juggled work, appointments, cooking and cleaning, parent-teacher conferences that never seemed to cater to working parents. For a period of time I spent my lunch hour picking up my child from school and dropping her off at a babysitter because I couldn’t find anyone to pick her up from school. I learned about sleepless nights with a teething baby or a child with an ear infection, and reporting to work on no sleep, or sick myself because there were no sick days or health insurance. I looked for support in single parenting groups, only to find lots of single men looking to date. I didn’t want to date; I wanted to feel like I wasn’t the only person in the world who felt so desperately overwhelmed.

Early in the game of learning to be a single parent, I reached a point of not being able to afford food. I had to humble myself and go to the Salvation Army. To this day, I can’t walk past a Salvation Army bell-ringer at Christmas without dropping whatever I can in the bucket.

In the midst of the pain and the loneliness, a miracle occurred. I began to see that I wasn’t cursed, I was blessed. I had a little person who consistently offered me unconditional love, even when I came home crying day after day. I was privy to an unfolding, a blossoming, a person becoming. I had been given someone who wanted to spend her life with me.

And one day, many years later, I was leaving the Laundromat. I was balancing three loads of laundry and walking to my car when a young man called after me, “Do you need some help?”

“No,” I said with a smile. “I can handle it. I do it all the time.”

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