Mothering on My Own

early thoughts on divorced parenthood

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much easier it is to mother now that I am no longer partnered. It doesn’t really make sense (except for the part where I don’t have my children for 50% of the time). Now I have to do everything. There is no one else to share the load. No one to take turns doing bedtime. No one to help with meals or errands. No one with whom to divide duties.

But dividing duties was one of the hardest parts of my marriage. One of these days I may write an essay about how our Fair Play discussion foreshadowed the end of our marriage. Because really, I don’t do much more than I used to. I did most of the things around the house and for the children during my marriage; I was just bitter because I didn’t want to be the one doing it all. I was not a stay-at-home mom; I worked part-time but that setup still meant I took on the brunt of all care. Today, I know I am the one doing all the things, and there is no expectation that any one else will step up. It is just me. And there is something freeing in that even though it is marginally more work.

I wish I could have given up on wanting my husband to do more in my marriage, so that I could have experienced this level of freedom while within that institution. But it didn’t feel fair, and it turns out I’m a feminist, so I couldn’t just let it go. Accept my life the way it was. And I certainly didn’t want to model that for my girls.

I want to be clear that my soonish-to-be-ex supports me financially and will for quite some time. This is a privilege not all single or divorced moms are afforded. I live in an area (Silicon Valley) where I will never be able to afford housing costs on a writer’s salary (even a ghostwriter’s salary). So I will receive financial support for a time (yet to be determined) while also hopefully continuing to split custody 50-50. (While some who do not understand feminism might wonder why I would feel comfortable being supported by a man, read a though-provoking take on alimony from stay-at-home dad Shannon Carpenter here).

But I thought I would share what it is like to have made this shift, to have exited out of the heterosexual nuclear family, and it isn’t the hopeless wasteland I expected. Because the truth is, I feel like I’m a better mom. My kids seem, dare I say, happier, when they are with me. Because they feel my energy. They sense I am lighter these days. We have such a lovely dynamic, the three of us in this rental home, with our two cats. I don’t miss my days in the other house, though I know they do sometimes. There are still nights when they wish we could go back to the way things were, all four of us under one roof, no shifting from house to house every few days. I get it. I do. I wish I could give that to them. But I would never be able to go back, just for that. We will adjust. We are adjusting.

It is strange to witness your former partner begin to manage the household without you. I have been waiting to see whether he starts to do all the things I did. Whether he understands now how heavy the weight was that I carried - the endless supply runs, the never-ending piles of laundry, the constant need to clean even though we paid cleaners to come every week. But I also notice how much he chooses not to do. It is funny, because there were times, in a passive-aggressive fit of frustration, that I would refuse to do something that in my mind needed doing to see how long it took for him to do it. Changing a light bulb in the bathroom, for example. Leaving something by the front door. But now I see that I might have been waiting forever. There are just some things that do not register, a level of tidying that does not occur. That’s fine, if it does not bother him. But of course it did bother me and because of that, I was the one doing something about it, and it all got to be too much.

I write this as if those annoyances were the cause of the end of our marriage. As you can imagine, it was just the cherry on top.

But this wasn’t meant to be a post about the frustrations of my marriage but about the joy in my post-marriage life. About how I feel like I can mother more completely without the extra burden of having to mother him. I have more of myself available to my children because I am no longer having to feed and nurture that relationship as well.

Gabor Maté writes about “the automatic mothering women provide their male partners, the emotional sustenance that forms the invisible mortar of many heterosexual relationships.” We don’t often even realize we are doing this work. It has been ingrained in us since birth to cater to others in this way, to provide emotional labor. “Women across the world are taught from a very young age to regulate, modulate, and manipulate their feelings in order to have a positive effect on the feelings of others…silently taking on necessary chores and activities everyone benefits from but no one wants to do,” Rose Hackman writes in Emotional Labor. 

This does not come without repercussions. Maté includes this quote from Dr. Julie Holland in his book The Myth of Normal: “the disproportionately high rate of anxiety and depression in women stems, in large part, from their absorption of male angst and their culturally directed responsibility for soothing it. In that sense, women are ingesting the antidepressants and anxiolytics for both sexes.” 

I never went on SSRIs, though that was definitely an issue in our marriage (he thought I needed them, I wasn’t so sure. As you’ll read in my book, I pursued other healing modalities instead). I don’t doubt that I struggle with low-grade anxiety. But sometimes I wonder if women feel like we are given no choice but to worry because our spouses aren’t tasked with keeping track of all the things (the forms, the emotions, the menu, the packing list).

My kids have been so exceedingly kind to me during this time. They compliment me all the time. They thank me for the fun vacations I plan. They actually enjoy the vacations (and considering I have a tween, this seems a miracle). They appreciate me, in a way that I am not sure they did before. I think they see all I was doing, now that their dad and I live separately. They recognize my invisible labor. The buffer that I was. The creator of home. The nester, the nurturer, the holder of needs. Or maybe I am more awake and thus able to accept their love in a way I wasn’t able to in my zombie, is-this-good-enough, how-long-can-I-take-this, state. All I know is I’m so grateful they are mine. That I get to walk them through this life. To show them that even though things may be hard, doing what is right for you is always the best choice.

The other day, on our road trip, my oldest daughter and I were talking as we drove north from Santa Barbara, Taylor Swift on in the background as she always is these days. We discussed having hard conversations and not wanting to seem rude, but also learning to speak up for yourself. Really, it was a conversation about boundaries. And my oldest is so cognizant of how others feel. She would never want to hurt someone’s feelings. But I said: “Listen, you can speak up for yourself and perhaps be considered rude, or you can swallow your truth and be resentful. I spent my whole life living the second way but I’m done with that. Today, I’d rather be rude than resentful.”

She’s only twelve. It may takes years before she learns to make that choice. But I hope it isn’t that long. I hope that the choices I’ve made are paving a different way for her.

The joy that I am finding in mothering these days may also be attributable to the fact that my children are now ten and twelve. And those ages are so very different than the toddler years. Plus, half of the time, they are not with me. Because I sometimes miss mothering them when they are away from me, when they are with me, I am in it. There is no where else I’d rather be.

So though the world presents divorce as evil, as the worst thing for children, I don’t think that is always the case. Obviously I am working hard to develop routines and patterns that nurture a healthy family dynamic in spite of our separate households. But for me, I have enjoyed these last six months of mothering more than I have any other time in my life. I just took my kids to Disneyland for my youngest’s tenth birthday by myself. I was nervous about doing so. Going to Disneyland is A LOT, even with a partner by your side.

But it was the best day ever. Easier than any of our other Disney trips. And I am realizing, through each circumstance conquered that once would have felt unthinkable: We are going to be okay.

FURTHER READING:

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power. Rose Hackman

Have you been tracking payalforstyle on Instagram and her posts about how she is teaching her son key skills so his partner won’t be left having to manage everything? My favorite was teaching him to look for things.

Two writer friends have books coming out in the next month! Please pre-order them if you can!

Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood by Minna Dubin.

Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent and Control by Amanda Montei.