When Mom is the Village

There’s a kind of exhaustion that comes with being a single mom that I don’t think you can fully understand until you’ve lived it.

It’s not just being tired. It’s knowing that no matter how tired you are, there is no one coming to relieve you.

When your kids are sick, everything stops.

You’re the one checking temperatures in the middle of the night. Cleaning up boogers, bloody noses and tears. Giving medicine. Holding the crying baby. Changing sheets at 2 a.m. Wondering if you should take them to the doctor. Wondering how you’re going to make it through tomorrow when you haven’t slept tonight.

And then morning comes, and somehow the rest of life still expects you to show up.

Work still needs you.

Bills still need to be paid.

The house still needs to function.

Your other kids still need breakfast, clean clothes, rides, attention, patience and a mom who has something left to give.

But sometimes you don’t.

One of the hardest parts of single motherhood isn’t even doing everything alone. It’s knowing that there is technically another parent in the world, and somehow you’re still doing everything alone.

There’s no, “I’ll stay home with them today. You go to work.”

No switching nights when you’ve been awake for three days.

No one automatically stepping in when you’re at your limit.

And when you don’t have a village nearby, there isn’t a backup plan either.

So you miss work.

Again.

And even when your job is understanding, the guilt eats at you. You worry about being unreliable. You worry about money. You worry about how many times you can say, “My kids…” before people start getting frustrated.

Meanwhile, you’re frustrated too.

Because you didn’t choose for them to get sick.

You didn’t choose to have no backup.

You didn’t choose to carry the responsibilities that were supposed to belong to two people.

But you’re the one absorbing every consequence of it.

That’s the part people don’t always see.

They see the mom who called out of work.

They don’t see the mom sitting on the bathroom floor with a sick child at 3 a.m., calculating how much money she’s going to lose by staying home the next day.

They don’t see her trying to comfort one child while another needs her.

They don’t see the mental list running through her head constantly: medicine, laundry, groceries, appointments, school, work, bills, dinner, baths, bedtime.

And somewhere on that list, buried underneath everyone else’s needs, is her.

Sometimes I don’t want advice.

I don’t want someone to tell me how strong I am.

Sometimes I just want to be allowed to say:

This is hard.

I’m tired.

I wish I had help.

I wish I had someone I could call and say, “I can’t do all of this today,” and know they would show up.

I wish the responsibility didn’t always fall on me.

But my kids still need their mom, so I keep going.

Not because I have some endless supply of strength.

Not because I never get overwhelmed.

Not because I’ve mastered doing everything alone.

I keep going because they are mine, and they deserve to feel safe and cared for even on the days when I feel like I’m barely holding everything together.

I love being their mom more than anything.

But loving my children and admitting that raising them without consistent help is incredibly hard can both be true.

Single moms don’t need to be reminded that we’re strong.

Most of us already know we’re strong.

We’ve had no choice but to be.

Sometimes we just need someone to see how heavy it is.