That is the response I get when trying to explain how you can be a single mother, yet be romantically involved with your child’s father.
Navigating a gray area like this is tricky, because I began this journey on my own. My sons father and I would break up, to make up in the first few months of my sons life until we found some sense of stability. Why I keep and maintain that single mother status is because by definition, it’s what I am.
The Collins Dictionary defines it as such. NOUN
a mother who has a dependent child or dependent children and who is widowed, divorced, or unmarried
My sons father and I became romantically involved a month or two after my sons birth after unpacking why it didn’t work the first time around. Not living together, and not seeing each other more than 3 times a week (maintaining the integrity of our parental agreement with more extended visits) allows us to see if we actually have what it takes to make it work.
Children don’t begin forming secure attachments until around 6 months. I had to make it pretty clear that if this isn’t going to work, we need to know that and give it our all since he was already born into so much uncertainty. Ready, able and willing to do this alone, I still recognized the value of having a partner and father figure for my son, in our lives, as long as it is healthy and serves us better than me doing it on my own. Oftentimes, it makes sense to go it alone due to conflicting values and parenting styles, incompatibility, etc. If you are motivated to expand your family beyond being a single mother, you’re going to have to create some consistency, boundaries and routine so that your child knows stability, regardless of your relationship status.
With that being said, if there was anyone I’d try to make it work with before anything else, it would be the man that helped me make our tiny human. The relationship was salvageable, but the unknowns are still unknown. Can we both do the work necessary to make the relationship and have our nuclear family work? Or do we recognize we gave it our best effort and move on with our lives? Only “specific amount” of time will tell. In the meantime, I equate this very gray area to dating someone with the intention of figuring out if you want that person to be a permanent fixture in your life.
Being left pregnant, going through it all alone and starting off your journey as a single mom results in a lot of reflection. You realize how much is at stake and want to be sure you’re making the best decisions for your child. That being said, choosing a life partner is no easy task. I truly believed I found that in my child’s father, until he left before I knew I was pregnant. It made me question my ability to make healthy decisions around who I chose as a partner. Having not grown up with a father figure, to a single mom myself, I learned to define what a good man looked like in my adult years.
I was able to find bits and pieces of what my ideal partner would look like in various relationships as an adult, and realized none would have it all but might indeed come close. To date my sons father gives us the chance to see if he will be the life partner I feel I deserve and want my son to see as his first examples of what a healthy loving relationship looks like. After years of self improvement, facing my shadows and learning how to confront my fear of being alone, I became okay with that possibility…not finding a partner and not settling. Knowing I may find a life partner in my sons father, or not, has given me the peace of mind that what is meant to happen for our lives will always show up in the timing it is supposed to.
Loving myself means I honor what is important to me, and stick with that. A supportive and reliable family structure and a life of stability is at the top of my list. Until that comes to fruition, I am a single mom. Until a man can become a partner…
noun
- either of a pair of people engaged together in the same activity.
I am a single mother. Whether or not that happens with my sons father, or someone fated to be in our lives isn’t something I can say is a known or given, until it comes to pass. Whether I do a kickass job raising my son alone with the support and reliability of a network outside of your traditional family structure, is always a possibility too.
Nothing in life is guaranteed and we have to be willing to be flexible in our life.
“Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.” – Lao Tzu
Recognizing that life will throw any and every curveball your way, expecting you to have the wisdom, maturity and grit to pull it together and march on with resilience, gives me peace that I’m not harming anyone giving this relationship a second chance. Especially where he and I have communicated those important milestones and expectations for getting to that stable family structure. That day may or may not come to pass, but we are consciously working through the gray. Whether or not we work, our son will always be loved by his birth father and mother. There are consequences to how we operate in life and he will know this regardless of the outcome.
Its time to stop assuming one relationship status or parenting title is better than the other. What matters ultimately is not how someone defines your experience, but that you define it for yourself as ultimately, you are the one living it.
