Single Mothering, Still

I'm no expert on parenting, but I hope to spare you some of that guilt

Cait, age 7, in our new apartment on Winslow Road, 1994.

For a long time, I told a story about a night during my single-mother years when my 9-year-old daughter jumped into my bed during a thunderstorm. She was quickly joined by our two black cats, Reggie and Winnie, and our pug, Gracie. Within minutes, all of them were sound asleep next to wide-awake me.   

“Five beating hearts in my bed, and not one of them was a man,” I’d joke, usually to laughs. It was a reliable punch line. This was in the mid-‘90s, when a lot of people believed the absence of a man, any man, had to be the worst part of a straight woman’s life. (This thinking has totally changed, right?)

A round of applause, please, for the woman inching toward 40 who could laugh at her bleak fate.

My life as a single mother began with legal papers served, suddenly and without warning, although there were plenty of signs that the earthquake was coming. It was a shaky transition; fingers clawing at the edge of the precipice, forcing a smile as I tried never, ever to look down. In the few pictures of me that exist from that time I look hollowed out with fear, which is no small feat for a face as wide as mine.

Eventually, I pulled my way onto solid ground and found a new map. Whenever my roiling fears managed to simmer into prayers, I asked for guidance to keep me stumbling in the right direction. I also made a promise to myself: I would stay single and virtually date-free for as long as it took to learn to be happy on my own.

In my case, that was a decade.

Cait is 36 now, and recently she texted a photo of her 7-year-old son crouched on their bathroom counter, just inches from the ledge. He was looking in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, just as his mother was taught to do at his age. He was enjoying the view, as he has recently lost his two front teeth.

Cait sends me photos almost every day. She knows how much I love this ongoing documentary of daily life. She is a career woman, married to a man who adores her. They have two young children and a dog named Mouse whose ears double the height of his head. So many stories.

My daughter had no reason to suspect this picture of her son would pull me back to a time, a photo, when we were a smaller family starting over. In the photo above, she was the same age as her son, and I was the age she is now. You know how memory works. One look at a photo, and 29 years ago becomes yesterday.

We had just moved out of our house and into the first-floor apartment of a Tudor home in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Fans of Celeste Ng’s outstanding novel, Little Fires Everywhere, will recognize the name of our new street: Winslow Road. Like Ng’s characters, Mia and Pearl, we lived there in the ‘90s, for two years. It’s the only street in Shaker Heights full of two-family homes. Soon after we moved there I started calling it Divorce Street because I was meeting so many other single parents.

My son, Andy, was already in college, so most of the time it was just Cait and me, finding our way. One evening, I walked by this scene in the bathroom and grabbed my Canon AE-1. The photo still brings me such a sense of peace. It was the first time since the great upheaval that I dared to believe we were going to be okay.

It was a tiny bathroom, but it had pretty tile walls and ceramic flooring typical of older homes in the Heights. During our whirlwind trip to Bed, Bath and Beyond, Cait picked out the Laura Ashley shower curtain and two matching towels. Then she carefully searched for four bath sheets that played off the curtain’s colors of blue, green and cream. We bought the metal stand, too, and the adhesive hooks to hold two hand towels by the sink. Little things that weren’t so small at the time.

I was trying to make this new apartment our home, but it wasn’t until I saw Cait sitting in that sink, humming as she brushed her teeth, that I could feel it happening. It was such an ordinary moment after extraordinary change for a little girl. There she was, in the center of my frame, my world.

Her socks are scruffy because, minutes earlier, we had been sitting on the back porch swing, both of us in stocking feet. As I told Cait after I texted her this photo last week, I have no idea why I didn’t suggest we wear shoes or pull off our socks. The rebellion of it, perhaps. We were free.

A few weeks later, I entered Cait’s school for parents’ night and walked toward the bulletin board where people had gathered to read their children’s essays about their lives. Several parents were laughing until they saw me, and then meekly pointed to the board.

Cait’s essay began with how her parents were going through a divorce, “but we just call it Mommy’s growth spurt.” I swear I have no memory of saying that, but I can’t deny that it sounds like me, then and now. I love that she saw the hope in it.

Recently, a reader chastised me for continuing to refer to my single mother days. “Your kids are grown, and you need to grow up, too. It’s all behind you now.”   

I responded with a question, but I already knew the answer. That reader has never been a single parent.

There is no erasing who I was for a decade of my life, just as my daughter can never stop being the girl who was raised by a single mother. There were times when, nearly sick with worry, I roamed the floorboards at night like a ghost in my own home. As hard as I tried to hide that part of me, Cait was too bright and empathetic not to notice. I worried about that, too. I’m no authority on parenting, but I am an expert on wasted guilt.

My daughter and I had a different life from the one I had imagined before she was born. It was a good life, she has assured me, no matter how many times I stumbled.

All those years ago, I sure didn’t see this coming. What a nice surprise. Here I am, grateful to have been that single mother.