To understand where the term “solo mama-ing” came from, we have to go back 15 years: Saturday, May 9th of 2009, changed my life! I remember this day for a number of reasons: it was the day before Mother’s day; my, then, “boyfriend” and I were going dirt bike riding; but most importantly, I became a first-time mom.
I remember the night before we were out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the Ventura Harbor. My hands gripped the cool, moist bottle of Corona and lifted it to my lips. The moment it touched them, my stomach lurched. I knew, in that instant, that I was pregnant. There’s a whole other story about how I knew I was pregnant, but that’s for another day.
The next morning, which happened to be Saturday, May 9, 2009, I took three pregnancy tests, each one a stronger positive than the first. Lots happened between that morning and the day my son was born, but, again, that’s another story. This story begins the moment I knew my son’s father was NOT going to be in our lives.
My son was 7 days old, and, because because my family lived 2 1/2 hours north of us, I had had very little help from family or friends.I was sleep-deprived, exhausted, and depressed from isolation. I had purchased the house I brought my son home to from the hospital to stay close to his dad in hopes that we would co-parent. The first day he came to “help” was the 7th day after our son’s birth. I had planned on taking a nice, long, relaxing shower, but I was so exhausted, I laid in my bed sobbing, while he sat out in my living room watching basketball. I’ll never forget the constant whistles signaling foul after foul after foul.
About 15 minutes later, I gathered myself enough to get out of bed and go shower, but I peaked into the living room first. There, on the couch, was my son’s father asleep with our 7-day old baby dangling from one arm crying! I scooped him into my arms, startling his dad awake, to which he said, “Did you have a nice shower?”
I asked him to leave and realized that we weren’t going to co-parent, not in the sense I had envisioned. Two nights later, his dad showed up at our house in the middle of the night, demanding to see “his son”! I moved 2 months later to be closer to my family.
Since then, I have had no help, physical, financial, or emotional, from my son’s dad. My son is now 14!
Single parents typically receive some sort of help from the other parent, whether it be shared custody, child support, or visitation. Having none of that from my son’s dad, I’ve come to refer to my status as solo parenting.
Being a solo mama, on a solo income, doing it all by myself has been hard…really hard. But, I had to make a decision: go after my son’s dad for child support, and risk bringing him back into our lives, or go it alone. I chose the latter.
It has been just us two since, and I haven’t regretted it once!
