A Kid Talks About Single Motherhood

By Rod Dreher • July 17, 2012, 12:43 PM

If you read nothing else today, look at Michael Brendan Dougherty’s essay reflecting on what it was like for him to grow up as the child of a single mother. Excerpt:

I don’t think my behavior that one night was the sole cause, but some time after that my mother really stopped having a life outside the home. She stayed in and conducted no romances of significance. Judging from her diaries and letters, the few men she engaged in even a passing interest were not all that good to her. As a single mother, helping to take care of her parents and her son, she wasn’t in a position to make men be courtly with her. So she stopped trying. That was the sexual revolution for her. Men willing to sleep with her, but not willing to build a family.

MBD goes on to talk about how the effects of single motherhood played out across his life, and his mother’s. You really, really need to read this. It took courage to write something so honest and raw. I would like to hear from readers of this blog about your own experiences growing up as the child of a single parent. But first, read MBD’s essay.

Posted in Culture, Family. Tagged Family, Michael Brendan Dougherty, single parent.

27 Responses to A Kid Talks About Single Motherhood

Matt in TX says:

July 17, 2012 at 1:06 pm

MBD’s essay is indeed very good. And affecting. I especially related to this part:

There was an emptiness in her life as I became more independent. Having lost the social role of mother, she had few other roles to play and took worse and worse care of herself. Discarded by men, unneeded by her son.

I am not the product of a single-parent family, but my parents did get divorced when I was 13, and while my father has happily remarried, my mother has not. She sounds a lot like MBD’s mother.

That said, my home *was* one filled with “resentment, yelling, and domestic abuse.” The pre-divorce, intact-nuclear-family period was plenty tumultuous. My parents made a mistake in thinking divorce would solve it, though. They were inextricably tied together by the fact that they had children, and when they couldn’t fight with each other directly, they fought through us kids, just as angrily.

I don’t mean this in a woe-is-me way: I’m fine. I turned out OK. But my mother lives 1,800 miles away, and I’m not so sure that she is. Anybody would have rated her marriage as a bad one, but now she has nothing.
Charles Cosimano says:

July 17, 2012 at 1:16 pm

Rod, you realize, of course, that you are writing stuff here that is supporting the pro abortion argument better than anything the pro choice folks have come up with for a long time.

In the romance and marriage marketplace of the middle class, a single mother is about as valuable as a plague carrier. All she brings to the table is bother and expense with no perceived benefits. The message of this story to a young woman entering adulthood in the middle class is clear. “You will use birth control. If the birth control should fail for some reason, you will get an abortion. If you do not, you will end up on the human scrap heap.”
Surly says:

July 17, 2012 at 1:17 pm

My parents divorced as well, and my mom never remarried, but she is busy and happy and has a wonderful life.

On the other hand, my mother in law has been married for over 60 years and my husband never observed his parents fighting. My MIL is deeply depressed, has no friends, and never leaves the house.

Some people will be lonely and unhappy. Some mothers will be so invested in their children that they do not cope well with empty nests. I don’t think you can blame single motherhood for MBD’s mom’s life. Maybe she would be lonely anyway, even if she had been married or had other children.
e says:

July 17, 2012 at 1:20 pm

My single mother did very well with us – I was the youngest of 7 – but it was because after I was born she completely abandoned everything else in life besides motherhood and her hours working making what money she could (housekeeping for wealthy people).

We suffered in every typical way – poverty, hunger, inadequate shelter and clothing, parental ignorance and rough treatment. But church people were nice to us, and I was utterly unconscious until nearly an adult how these people viewed my mother’s questionable choices to have had these children by several different fathers – men who variously drank themselves to death, abandoned her and us, or ended up in prison. The community never betrayed judgment or prejudice to us, and ultimately we have all turned out okay.

We were all too busy trying to survive to have fallen into emotional games or codependent dysfunction as that other writer experienced. Our mother was only away from us when working so we could have food and necessaries, and there was so little money that there was never question about what might be “fair” or not, or if we could have certain things, do certain activities or take trips. We could not. End of story. It eliminated a lot of conflict, very simply.

My mother too seemed to grow more immature as she aged, as her children grew to take on more responsibility – even to the point of finally regressing to be a very difficult brat, like the little girl or adolescent she never had a chance to be, because she was too busy surviving in her own situation.

My mother always held to us the ideal of an intact family, though we did not have that and all our social and community peers and relationships were among the lowest of the low of troubled people and situations. We all married young, and stayed married, and have children today marrying a little later, but hopefully keeping their families together as well.
Gretchen says:

July 17, 2012 at 1:50 pm

I’d like everyone to remember that a lot of single mothers I know didn’t intend to be that way. They fell in love, married, had children, and then the guy left. You really can’t help being a single mother if the guy leaves. You can’t make him stay. I have one friend who cried for months after her husband suddenly announced that he was outta here. She never saw it coming – she thought they were happily married. But he wouldn’t reconsider, and was gone. He’s now happily remarried, and she’s alone. A lot of these discussions of single mothers assume that she was irresponsibly screwing around, careless about her birth control, and unconcerned about whether there would be a father in her child’s life. But that’s not what it looks like from where I sit. A lot of women do all the right things, and when the kids come along the guy decides this isn’t any fun any more and splits. She’s left holding the baby, and she’s the one who gets the disapproval for being a single mom. Nobody notices that he’s a single dad, because he’s off living the single life without his kids.
Michael says:

July 17, 2012 at 1:51 pm

People make decisions about how their lives are ordered. Those decisions have consequences, and those consequences are often times borne by the children more than the adults.

A single Mom with an MBA from Harvard will have an entirely different experience than a single mom who dropped out of high school (like mine did). To paraphrase Catholic apologist George Wiegel, truth implies obligations, and obligations require choices. What is true is that single moms have a harder time than married moms. We as a society are obligated to acknowledge that fact.
Sam M says:

July 17, 2012 at 2:31 pm

I read that earlier today. What a great piece of writing, and an even stronger bit of self-analysis. For him to be aware of his roots like that, but also be so clear that his case is not necessarily there to prove the rule… it’s what nonfiction writing is supposed to be about. Fantastic stuff.
Beyng says:

July 17, 2012 at 3:07 pm

According to the “private” lives of Hollywood’s younger actresses, single motherhood is the hip thing to do. Every self-respecting single woman should accessorize herself with a baby!
cecelia says:

July 17, 2012 at 3:26 pm

my single mom died just two weeks ago – and we are now in the process of sorting through all the paperwork re: inheritance etc. As I do this I am amazed at how successful my Mom was in the financial sense. She was ferocious in her determination to have a decent life for us and her as well as helping her parents. She went back to college after her divorce and finished her degree, got a better job and then worked two jobs to get the money to buy a house. She continued to work two jobs to finance putting her three daughters through Catholic schools (where I grew up – staying out of the public school was a necessity) then getting us through college – even financing nice weddings. She was like a tiger in her determination around those issues. She cared also for her parents and made sure she had financial stability for her old age. She also after we grew up got deeply involved in community volunteering so she had a full life. I think she ultimately was happy but – big but – I also think she was often exhausted emotionally from all that work and obligations so sometimes she could be distant emotionally and short tempered. I cannot say how much I admire what she ultimately managed to do after Dad took off ( he failed after a short time to provide any kind of support and eventually moved far away).

As a kid I did feel vulnerable because I had no father and when money got tight I often felt insecure. There also were things that she simply did not have the energy to take care of so sometimes my sisters and I felt on our own – we had to assume a lot of responsibilities and be independent.
I think the big difference in her and our lives was that she had an education and so a good job. But all these years later and despite my deep love and admiration for her – I still wish I and my sisters had grown up in a home with both loving Mother and Father. Fathers play more than a financial role in a family and that is what we (and she) missed out on.
Mont D. Law says:

July 17, 2012 at 4:04 pm

I read the article and don’t see it as being a comment on much of anything.

Being a single mother is hard on mothers and children but so what. Being lots of things is hard. When did it become our obligation to provide perfect lives for our children? The life this guy’s mother provided for him was pretty good, better then a lot of kids in two parent families get. But still it was not enough. His mother should have done better or society should have forced her to. So that he could have a father and siblings. Talk about entitlement.

Doughty says he would throw the dice, but 50 years ago there would have been no dice to throw. He envisions his mother and father happily married, but it is unlikely that his foreign father would have been considered suitable. His mother would have been whisked away and never seen him again. Or if she’d have been strong enough to resist that – his life would have been much worse. Sluts didn’t get a good education or a good job 50 years ago. And the men would not just have wanted to sleep with her – they would have insisted. Bastard children didn’t fair too well either. Taunted at school, disparaged by teachers, a source of painful shame and alienation for his mother, so not a lot of support there. Her family would have disowned both of them, so no loving grandparents.

Charles right. The best thing she could have done was use contraception. The second best thing would have been to have an abortion.
Rod Dreher says:

July 17, 2012 at 4:06 pm

The second best thing would have been to have an abortion.

I’m sure Michael will appreciate your wish that his mother had killed him in utero. You people, I swear.
Beefy Levinson says:

July 17, 2012 at 4:07 pm

I’m an only child and my parents divorced when I was 12. Neither of them has ever remarried. To my knowledge neither has even been on a date since then. I’ve asked my mother about it and she said it was a conscious decision on her part to not date or remarry after the divorce. She wanted to focus on raising me.

How’d I turn out? Well, I’m a college graduate who can string a coherent sentence together, and I’m not addicted to drugs. Might I have turned out better if dad had been in the house all that time? Maybe. But my parents always got along quite well after the divorce, much to the surprise of their divorced friends. My dad has told me that if mom ever wanted to get back together, he’d happily return.

My experience isn’t typical of kids raised by single mothers, I know. All other things being equal though, I still think it’s better for kids to be raised in two parent homes.
Mont D. Law says:

July 17, 2012 at 4:14 pm

[I’m sure Michael will appreciate your wish that his mother had killed him in utero. You people, I swear.]

Well that’s a silly statement, why would I have any wishes at all concerning this guy and his mother. But since much of his heartfelt prose is dedicated to how hard this situation was on her, why is it illegitimate to bring up what was in her best interests. After all he’s pretty forceful about what would have been in his.
cka2nd says:

July 17, 2012 at 4:26 pm

20+ years ago, back when I was active in defending abortion clinics against Operation Rescue, I remember a Maoist from the Revolutionary Communist Party telling me that her son – then around 12 or so – was well aware of both how much she loved him and how much harder her life had been because she decided to have him (no sugarcoating there), and that her choice didn’t mean that she was any less committed to other women having the choice of whether or not to have an abortion.
James Kabala says:

July 17, 2012 at 4:29 pm

Mr. Law: You do realize that not every life played out like a melodramatic novel or the Supremes’ “Love Child,” right?
J the second says:

July 17, 2012 at 4:39 pm

I’m sure Michael will appreciate your wish that his mother had killed him in utero. You people, I swear.

Oh come on, Rod. Michael is a clear case of Randall Terry Syndrome. It’s never the stupidity or insanity of the mother and her life choices that is to blame, it’s always fault of the social liberalism that gave her choices she screwed up or didn’t force men to “do the right thing” (which they didn’t do real often in the Good Old Days either).

You’re always setting up tradition and duress as compensators and substitutes for intelligence/mental health and good choices. Does this really not strike you as the attempted defense of stupidity that it is?
JonM says:

July 17, 2012 at 4:44 pm

Mont D. – you assume that the mental/physical/spiritual toll of an abortion would be preferable to the struggle she had as a single mother. I highly doubt it is that simple.
Anne says:

July 17, 2012 at 6:35 pm

Reading MBD’s memoir of the presumably negative effects his mother’s single motherhood had on both his and his mother’s lives, I’m struck by how burdened he apparently feels by what past generations would have considered an ordinary life. For instance: He says that, unlike his peers, he had to put himself through college via loans, pay some of his mother’s as well as his own expenses, and do chores around her house even after he was old enough to be on his own. And, then, as if that weren’t bad enough, his mother made him feel guilty about leaving her behind and moving out of her life after graduation. Oh, the pain.

I know. I know. I’m getting old and curmudgeonly, but her singleness aside, I feel for this woman. She spent her life taking care of first, her parents, then her son, and what does she get for it all? The kid writes this.

As for all that alleged guilt-inspiring maternal angst, who says it’s reserved to single mothers? If so, they’ve stolen the place another generation of writer/sons gave Jewish mothers, and not so long ago.
Mary Russell says:

July 17, 2012 at 6:44 pm

“In the romance and marriage marketplace, single mothers have as much eligibility as plague carriers.”

Do you have any stats to back this up? In my experience, people are constantly marrying and divorcing, marrying and divorcing. I even had someone tell me recently that “the first marriage is just practice for the second one.”. And he meant it.

True.story: my husband and I married in Oklahoma in 2004. OK has the highest divorce rate in the country. When we were interviewing the DJ for our rather conventional reception he asked us, “OK, how many sets of parents will there be for the father and bride dance, and for the groom and mother dance? When we replied, just one set of parents for each person, no divorcing and remarrying, he almost fell out of his chair: “That never happens!”. He had not had both a bride and groom from intact families on both sides for several years.
JonF says:

July 17, 2012 at 8:29 pm

I was in a single parent family for three years, because my mother died when I was nine (my father remarried, a widow and family friend with three kids of her own, when I was twelve).
The experience is dominated in my memory by the brute fact of my mother’s death. All I can really say about it is that it made me hyper-responsible because I was determined not let things fall apart. I learned how to do lots of domestic stuff, even to cook. I kept the garden going, took care of the dog, pretty much took care of myself too. My father worked odd hours. My older brother (18 in 1976) was my other adult caretaker, and the aforementioned neighbor who later became my step-mother was also available. My father did become more solicitous of me, and started taking me on short vacations: Mackinaw, Niagara Falls, Gettysburg. Then he married Ma, and life resumed, in a somewhat different pitch, and with a step-sister in the house (Ma’s older two kids were already out on their own).
A difficult time emotionally, but hardly an experience that left me damaged and dysfunctional. One reason I become annoyed at people who speak of kids who have lost a parent (whether to death or divorce) as if they were doomed to basket-casery, or of step-parents as if the Cinderella/Snow White portrait were true of them.
L617 says:

July 17, 2012 at 8:50 pm

As a single father (my ex died six years ago leaving me to raise 2 pre-teen girls on my own), I can’t speak to the experience of the single parent child, but I sure know a lot about the life of the single parent.

I think this article is shockingly brave – if one can be deemed brave for being a sh*t in public about his dead mother. This poor woman probably suffered a life of worry and fear, one of financial constraint and self denial, a life of sacrifice. She allowed her 10 year old brat to bully her into remaining alone — and worse, lonely — for the rest of her years. She gave of herself to support her parents and her son and then she has the temerity to not want to be abandoned after she gave up everything? What nerve. And then to have her ungrateful kid establish her legacy in print as a juvenile and co-dependent. How brave!! What honor!

His mom was poor and he has student loans. Well boo friggin’ hoo.

I can’t know how much this guy loved his mother, I hope it was a lot, but he has a peculiar way of showing his love after she gave up everything, including her own happiness, for him and those around her. I hope he’s happy he trotted her carcass out in public to flog it a few times so he could make some greater point about the counter sexual revolution. What a creep.
pinkjohn says:

July 17, 2012 at 9:14 pm

While I don’t find this piece as moving as you do, Rod, it does put me in mind of Frank Bruni’s column today on individualism run amok.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/opinion/bruni-individualism-in-overdrive.html?hp

It also seems to me that this fellow is sort of whining about why he can’t let his own individualism run amok. I’m not unsympathetic, having grown up in a broken home myself. But there are a number of mixed messages here.
stef says:

July 17, 2012 at 9:19 pm

Re: Doughtery’s article: Everybody wants more “stigma” until it gets slathered all over them. I seriously doubt he wants the kind of “do-over” he thinks he does.
Michael Brendan Dougherty says:

July 17, 2012 at 11:16 pm

I find it really odd that people thought I was whining or feeling like I was entitled to more. All I did was note the very factors that make single-parenthood more difficult for mother and child alike. Obviously death and disease, war, malnutrition, rape and abuse can make childhood worse. So on a cosmic scale, yeah, I was lucky. And I was grateful.

I don’t claim to have had a difficult or unhappy childhood. I just wanted to recount how being a single-mother by its very nature created emotional and financial difficulties that would not have been present. That it isn’t just some unconventional adventure as Roiphe would have it.

I don’t claim that somehow having ANY two parents is better than having my beloved mother. Obviously, being raised by two sociopaths or Nazis would be worse. I’m comparing a well-adjusted, self-sacrificing single-mother to a well-adjusted self-sacrificing two parent home.

How do I know it wouldn’t have been terrible if my father and mother married and stayed together? Just judging by their character and how they acted since that time.

I don’t feel burdened by my circumstances at all, though at times I did feel incapable of providing what my mother clearly needed, which was something more than just one son living over 200 miles away.
Mont D. Law says:

July 18, 2012 at 2:38 am

(I’m comparing a well-adjusted, self-sacrificing single-mother to a well-adjusted self-sacrificing two parent home.)

Why it strikes me as ungracious is you were never going to have that – not with your parents. Certainly your mother could have given you up to another couple but I am sure you love your mother too much to fault her for making that decision. She could have remarried, but I doubt that is a solution you would find acceptable.

Again, when did being born entitle anyone to a perfect childhood. When did we start criticizing parents for being human beings. For most of human history, you grew where you were planted and it was called life.

I was raised in exactly the home you so lovingly imagine and yearningly envy. A stable, loving well adjusted family with a stay at home mother. No one drank, they loved each other, there was no abuse. It was not better or easier or less trying then yours.
Sam M says:

July 18, 2012 at 7:08 am

MontD:

I am a little taken aback by your ranking of the best things she could have done.

“The best thing she could have done was use contraception.”

That would be better than, say, being more selective about who to have sexual intercourse with?

“The second best thing would have been to have an abortion.”

Selectivity still doesn’t crack the rankings yet? Maybe… not having sexual intercourse with the guy until she’s sure he’s a good match for raising children? Even if not… why does abortion automatically rank higher than putting the baby up for adoption?
Jack Ross says:

July 18, 2012 at 9:17 am

My parents divorced when I was seven. Both were financially successful, but it was a terrible marriage. As you would expect of a well off Jewish kid in Bethesda, MD, the main impact was emotional, and it effected all of us in a thousand small ways. Both my sister and I had major issues as teenagers and traumatized the other with them, and my mother let her emotions get the best of her too often. But my father, with his pronounced social awkwardness and low emotional intelligence, would have been an absolute disaster having to raise us as teenagers. Such is the tragedy of the new upper class.