single mothers, and why they're awesome

I never thought consciously about the fact that I was raised by a single mother until recently. Mainstream conceptions of single motherhood tend to encompass girls and women who have children out of wedlock, (stereo)typically in the absence of a partner. I hadn't distinguished these women from those who lose their partners from death, divorce or various forms of leave-taking or abandonment. I guess I found myself under the same line of thought until I've started to become aware of recent conversations where I tell people that I only started speaking Arabic "when my dad left."

The story is that my parents, who are both Arab but of different nationalities, could never agree on which dialect of Arabic they would teach me. Eventually they put their arguments for or against the Kuwaiti or Jordanian dialect aside and decided that they would teach me English, instead. Once my parents got divorced, though, my mother and I began to speak in Kuwaiti rather than English at home.

Anyway, after telling various iterations of this story with the phrase "when my dad left" instead of "when they divorced," I got to thinking that, in my case at least, "divorcing" and "leaving the family" are pretty much the same thing. A notable exception lies with my maternal aunt, who divorced her husband but nevertheless maintained a great friendship with him until his death, even having him move back into her house when he fell ill. But the point is that until recently, I never grouped "divorce" and "abandonment" under the same category, where I'm convinced they both belong.

So I was raised by a divorced, abandoned, and single mother, starting from when I was around eight. I grew up in a household of entirely women: my mother, sister and I. Although in the distant past I sort of lived in the same house with my dad and, post-divorce, sometimes saw him on a bi-monthly basis, I don't really remember what it's like to be raised by a father. My childhood and adolescent experiences and education were foreseen exclusively by my mother. From the very first day of my education up to the very last, my mother drove me to from school, even while she maintained a full-time job so that she could support our family and pay for my schooling.

My sister, who is actually my half-sister, was also raised (minus her early adolescent years) by my mother, who divorced her first husband (not my father) when my sister was still a baby. My mother never went to university, even though she was given a full scholarship to study in the US, because she was raising my sister, who was still very young at the time. My mother basically went through two phases of single motherhood.

I will never respect and idolise anyone more than I do my mother, because in my eyes she gave up every semblance of herself in order to give me and my sister a life. When I think of my mom and her extended life as a single mother, I'm outraged by societal lashes against the role of (typically younger) single mothers in society. Putting aside the arguments against the "irresponsibilities" of teenage pregnancies, I know that most people can accept that it takes some fucking guts to to raise a kid on your own.

It also infuriates me when people try to mitigate the difficulties of being a single mother by arguing for the absolute necessity of close-knit, nuclear, socially and religiously sanctioned families. Being married to a man is not going to make a family any better if the husband is absent, irresponsible, or worse, violent. Maternal support can come from immediate and extended family, friends, communities and government support. Though most of us were brought up thinking that a child will generally be raised by a man and a woman, all that really matters is that the child is surrounded by love and adequate material support.

I had a loving mother who provided for me in every possible way, and I can't have asked for more.

Happy Mother's Day.