Unexpected Lessons from Solo Motherhood
I wasn’t prepared for how solo motherhood might change the rest of my life. I naively thought I’d prepare carefully, have my baby and live happily ever after.
What surprised me was how becoming a solo mother would gradually reconfigure the rest of my life.
My heart overflows with love and gratitude. I’ve grown, my life has expanded and my child is energetic, healthy and happy. On paper everything worked out exactly as it should.
And yet, in other ways, motherhood has made my world much smaller. Holding those two truths at once can be difficult.
Let me give you some examples:
Working for myself to maximise flexibility and time with my child. Tick. Understanding I would often be nap trapped, twisted in a weird angle, trying to work on my phone in 20 minute bursts, rather than sitting concentrating “properly” at my computer. Complete fail. Flexibility and productive capacity, I discovered, are not the same thing.
Securing a place in nursery. Tick. The separation anxiety and guilt of sending my child to nursery earlier than I wanted because I had to pay the bills. Underestimated.
Creating a “village” of new mummy friends and people willing to help. Tick. Realising that maintaining that village would itself require time, reciprocity, organisation and brain power I didn’t always have. Fail.
Accounting for the fact my child just doesn’t like being left with some people, or that my own parents might suddenly be out of action, so that I needed “backup to the backup”. Nope. Available help is not always the same as realised help. Tough lesson.
Awareness of the process of Marcescence and the identity shifts that would come with being a mother. Tick. Predicting how long that process might take, or that I would eventually drift from some of my “old” friends without children. Another fail.
Expecting the isolation that can come from not necessarily knowing my new mum friends deeply; that we are sometimes simply operating in the same trench. Another fail.
A plan for physical recovery postpartum. Tick. Anticipating the toll that carrying the baby, the shopping, the buggy in and out of the car, beyond postpartum, in daily life, would have on my body. Fail. Budgeting for ongoing chiropractor. Fail!
A lovely home. Yes. Until my already frazzled nervous system couldn’t stand my toddler trying to climb the balcony at every opportunity. Solo moving with a toddler. Again, I hadn’t factored it in.
There’s an emotional dimension I hadn’t fully anticipated either. My much wanted solo pregnancy still coexisted with grief about how I had imagined motherhood; almost constant fear about carrying so much responsibility alone; and, even now, sadness for some of the things absent from my child’s life, mixed with the sheer joy of watching her grow, learn and find her way in the world.
Am I always able to parent in the way I imagined I would? Not at all. Do I regret the decision? Absolutely not. Both things can be true without cancelling each other out.
What have I learnt, particularly now that I think about whether to have another child?
That none of my decisions stay isolated. Where I live changes my access to support; childcare changes what work is possible; work changes my finances and capacity; support changes the kind of parent I can sustainably be.
That keeping some part of myself outside motherhood sometimes requires imperfect tradeoffs. My resourcefulness, willpower and love can’t be the entire contingency plan in perpetuity.
That my buffers need buffers. Help can disappear; circumstances change; children don’t always cooperate with the plans adults make. The support I rely on needs building before I desperately need it.
And perhaps most importantly, I have learnt that a decision can be unquestionably right and still make other parts of life harder.
Difficulty isn’t necessarily evidence that I chose wrongly. Sometimes it is simply part of the reality of the choice I made.
I would choose my daughter again, forever. I would just go into that decision understanding much more clearly that I wasn’t only choosing motherhood. I was choosing a change to the whole shape of my life.
~ Amy Stephenson
www.solospheres.com
To discuss this and other SMC topics, join SMC and take part in our discussions on our lively online 24/7 Forum and at local chapter meetings.
