Solo Mother

is divorce a crash course in self?

by christina on July 5th, 2007

If divorce is the crucible by which women must find themselves, you can count me out of this particular brand of navel gazing in my next lifetime.

There’s an interesting article by Sarah Hampson in the Globe and Mail entitled Divorce: the great feminist teacher.

My head is spinning as it is, with wonderings on who I am and what I want out of life. I’m pulled in three different directions at once: work, child, romance. The three are not compatible, and I find I can’t juggle: I can only keep two in play at a time. Part of me does feel as though I’m missing out on a ‘normal’ life, with a whole family structure. Part of me is perfectly happy to be a single woman the rest of my life. In any event, I’m preparing for that eventuality, being sure that I will never have to rely upon someone else for my safety or happiness. I think, if we as single mothers give our children balanced, healthy experiences within the home and out in the wide world, full of love, encouragement, and support from not only us mothers, but from the community at large and our extended family of relatives and friends… then I think this quote from the article sums up the struggle some women find themselves in, and why they just have to get out:

Nobody helped us grapple with the complexity of being female: to want an interesting career, to love, to be loved, to be a mother, to be a wife, to want some measure of independence. No one discussed how to be that Have It All-er.

Women and men of my boomer generation had to figure out the modern terms of marriage while we were in one. Which isn’t easy. It’s like trying to teach a horse that’s been trained to plod around a ring to leap over the rails and gallop through the field.

Maybe that partly explains the oft-repeated statistic that in divorces of people older than 40, the majority of the splits are initiated by women. Maybe those gals have been popping babies, upholding the domestic-goddess ideal, building their careers and being wifely, and then they get to this point where they decide that the husband can’t be what they need (or doesn’t want to be) and they’re tired of the struggle. If they have been working, or at least keeping a hand in a career while in the child-rearing years, then they have an economic viability outside of a marriage that allows them to do without one.

We are the Straddle Generation, caught between old ideas of marriage and quickly evolving expectations of how we want to live.

I’m not a mankiller. I like their company on the odd Saturday night. But I’ve done some changing within my own divorce crucible, and the beliefs I once held about traditional marriage are right out the window. I’m sure that makes George Bush Junior and his gang of merry henchmen just cringe. But there it is.

I love my life. How about you?

Credit *Hairbear for the photo on Flickr

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