Mother’s Day 2023: Why we should be celebrating single parenthood today

What do we usually do on Mother’s Day?
Rhetorical question. 

I’ll be honest about this. Though I usually loathe the concept of a single day dedicated to acknowledging and expressing one’s feelings for loved ones, there’s also a tiny bit of a paradox here. I secretly love the gifts and the fact that the family makes an effort to pamper us mothers and well, sometimes, there are Mother’s Days where we actually get to wake up late and also get (hold your breath) breakfast in bed!

So, what are our basic needs really? 

To be seen, heard, appreciated and loved. Days like these are somewhat a bit of that and it is an acknowledgement of our efforts that go into raising our children, through chaos, strife, adversity and woe which is the mainstay of everybody’s life. 
Oh, sorry, not everybody.

There will always be a section which has it much easier and there will always be some who have it harder. I don’t mean just mothers. I mean all parents who ‘mother’ their children. It could be a dad or a grandmother, a grandfather or even people who take on the responsibility of caring for children who are not their biological offspring.

The definition of ‘mother’ as ‘female parent’ according to most dictionaries, including the Merriam Webster, is now wholly redundant, given the fact that the stereotypical ‘mom’ role is being redefined every single day as we march forward to the future. Single parents, irrespective of gender, can be the 'mother.'

The times we live in are such that it is not necessary that only the female parent ‘mothers’ the child. Single parents are increasing and it could be because of a circumstance like death or by choice like divorce or even rape, abandonment or a single-person adoption. Studies show that families are breaking up with alarming alacrity all over the world and the Covid era taught us that death need not come with any warning. This was the time when so many children lost their biological parents and are today being raised by either single parents or a family.

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A new Pew Research Center study of 130 countries and territories shows that the US has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households. Almost a quarter of American children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%). In comparison, 3% of children in China, 4% of children in Nigeria and 5% of children in India live in single-parent households. In neighbouring Canada, the share is 15%.

This tells us what we already know: single parenting is a reality today. It also reminds me of a quote by former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg who had to become a resilient single parent after the sudden death of her beloved husband Dave. She said, “For me, this is still a new and unfamiliar world. Before, I did not quite get it. I did not really get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home. I did not understand how often I would look at my son’s or daughter’s crying face and not know how to stop the tears. How often situations would come up that Dave and I had never talked about and that I did not know how to handle on my own. What would Dave do if he were here?”

Her words, (though she did outline that she was privileged because she never had to endure poverty or abuse that so many single mothers have had to) since then, haunted me and brought home the reality that on Mother’s Day, we should stop glorifying the ‘breakfast in bed’ made by the ever-smiling and supportive family that we can afford to be smug about. This, in Sandberg's words, is what the real picture is.

And that’s where mothers, or anybody who does the mothering, who looks after a child and raises them single-handedly, should be celebrated. That is the real challenge and how many of us can claim to have been through that and survived?

It reminds me of people I know who are ‘mothering' their children through it all. A divorced dad who tries to be the best parent he can when he sees his kids every once in a while, a widow who works extra hard so that her kid has the best of everything in life, a same-sex couple who brought home a child and one chose to stay home and take care of the baby, and then a single mother with a physical disability who decided to adopt a child. 

This is who we should be celebrating on Mother's Day. 

If governments, employers and society can support single parents, then this whole brouhaha about Mother’s Day will get some semblance of a meaning. They need the support the most and we should be there to give it to them.

Motherhood is precious, humbling, beautiful, painful and everything else rolled into one and it is the journey of raising a child from infancy to adulthood that takes up your whole life. Surely, there can be no greater cause than this? 

And for all the frivolities that she was usually associated with, perhaps nobody put it better than former US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who said: “If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much."

A truth we can't really ignore and indeed an arduous task.

On this Mother’s Day and every other Mother’s Day, I've decided to stop celebrating myself and instead raise a toast to celebrate and support single parenthood, the people who are the real, resilient, courageous ‘mothers’ all over the world.

Happy Mother's Day 2023!


(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)