I am that single mother

I needed to use the bathroom urgently. So urgently that I was developing an anxiety attack. It was that urgent! At that restaurant I stood with my seven month baby, baby bag and hand bag. I scanned my environment and I recognized one lady who I often saw in church entering the bathroom. I followed her and requested her to hold the baby for me as I relieved myself. I mean, if she pulled a fast one on me I would run after her as fast as lightning. Woe unto me, she vehemently refused! She refused to hold my baby for the few minutes I’d have taken to use the bathroom. I almost fainted. I entered the loo with my child and bags and did my thing.

I leave my evening class and get home at about 8.30 p.m. My daughter was just learning how to speak. She kept following me everywhere. Pua , pua, pua Mummy. My instinct tells me to take a keener look at her nose. Inside her nose were papers pushed too far up as she tried to remove them herself. I wore back my sweater, picked my wallet and car keys and off I went to the hospital. In the hospital when the first Doctor assessed my daughter’s nose she called another Doctor and then another and another. They kept bringing different sizes of calipers and tools. Everyone looked too worried for my own liking. One nurse came up to me and asked “Baba  mtoto amefika wapi?” I opted to keep quiet. 5 minutes later the Doctor asks me “Who brought you here? Are you on your own?” I wanted to scream loudly but I wanted my daughter treated. So I shut up and a man power of about 10 medics finally pulled out the papers in Angel’s nose.

Angel asks me a difficult question as I navigate traffic to try and get home early. Is our family a nuclear one or is it a single parent family? This child one fine day will give me a heart attack. She asks tough questions without much consideration for my preparedness (My brain reminds me I am the grown up. I ought to be ready all the time). Even before I recover from whom is my Daddy, she is already asking me what kind of a family we have.

Learning from my earlier blunders of answering too fast when she asked questions, I painfully counted one to ten as I waited for the question to be reasked or for more information to be given. She goes on, My social studies Teacher (In her mind the law, rules and regulations are made by Teacher and they cannot be broken. Whatever Teacher said is cast in stone.) said “ a family is of a single parent when only one parent is present” She keeps quiet for a while then tells me and it can only be a mother, right? I ask why? Because if it is a father how will he change the baby or a girl? I keep quiet. I want to know what else she knows and thinks. A nuclear family is one that has a father and a mother even if one has gone somewhere else. I keep quiet and wonder how these explanations were given to her. I ask her” Which kind of family do you think we have?”. She answers unflinchingly we have a nuclear family even if my Daddy is far far away. Silence from me.

At this juncture I go back to all the conversations I have heard of single mothers.

I remember a couple of years ago I asked an older women who served in the church council on whether they had a women’s ministry. Her answer is engraved in my memory, “We have two one for young mothers na ya masingle mothers.” The last part of the statement was said in such contempt. I wondered to myself why didn’t they just run one program for both sets of women? Didn’t it occur to them that they probably suffer similar predicaments on earth? I smiled, the woman assumed I fell in the former category so she went to tell me about it and ignored the latter. I decided to allow her to continue swimming in her folly.

So who is a single mother? In my opinion it is anyone who raises her/his children singlehandedly. While this seems obvious, I find it increasingly disturbing that women from households where a man is the head of the home are still single mothers. Those men do absolutely nothing towards the welfare of the children. The reverse is rarely true.

And in our very parochial and prejudiced society, single mothers are mostly misunderstood. I also realized the lower you are in the economic ladder the regard to your family status is more pronounced. When stories of single mothers with economic muscle, political power or connections are done we are told they have children. On the other hand if a story is told of a woman in the slum or from the less than a dollar a day corner the first thing to be mentioned about her is that she is a single mother with x number of children.

I get asked all the time how I became a single mother. Did I choose that path knowingly and willingly? I often laugh at the notion that I planned to be a single mother. You see, I did not adopt my child neither did I get her from the sperm bank. I became pregnant with all the intention of raising children with their father present in every sense. In fact I was married then. I had no intention whatsoever of being a single mother. It never occurred to me I would end up been one. Angel’s father is not involved in her life. And I cannot answer for him on the question why not. 

I grew up in a nuclear family. A number of my aunties and neighbors were single mothers. Then, it wasn’t proper to ask where their husband’s or father’s to their children were. The answer to such a question would be in the form of a nice beating. So you didn’t ask and you weren’t told. Then, the community cared and raised all the children. It wasn’t odd to be beaten by five different adults for the same mistake. It was everybody’s business to ensure that children grew up straight.

Today communal upbringing of children is non-existence. Actually, we are worried about all the evil around us and that some of that danger is posed by the grown-ups who have access to our children. This is aggravated by the access to information. Hence the art of parenting becomes a very tough game. You have no choice but to be involved whether the other parent wants to be involved or not.

The instances I give as a single mother may probably look not too serious. I mean what is it about wanting to go to the toilet but not been able to? Until you are in that situation you don’t know how serious it is. The days I want my child to hear and learn things from another source of authority, pray or be disciplined by someone else. When I want her to be taught how to ride her bike, play a music instrument,  climb a tree, be carried shoulder high, have a date with her father (to prepare her to never entertain jokers in her life and the intricacies of life from a male authority), or run after a rabbit. And the days I want someone else to be bothered with her school fees, activity fees, go for shopping with her, buy her clothes or shoes, take her on holiday or even Guka’s. The day I want someone else be involved in the spiritual, psychological, physical and emotional upbringing of the child. The gazillion things that are required of me could once in a while be bestowed on another adult who has as much stake as I have in the wellness of that child.

The cold truth is that not everyone is willing to do this. Some people have just opted not to have a stake in the wellness of their own child(ren). And hence we have stepped up and become single mothers we wear the shoes of mother and father. We pull all the energies, resources and love given to us by God to raise our children to reach their full potential as well as become proper adults. Let it not be said they turned out terrible because they were raised by a single mother. In fact the minute one becomes a single mother, the stakes in the well being of that child quadruples!

And let not anyone kid another how easy it is on this journey. I am yet to find a person who by choice alone becomes a single mother. A story or circumstance lurks in the background. 

Barack Obama(POTUS) the first black (Ok. African American) president of the most powerful nation- The United States of America was raised by a single mother.

Sojourner.