When I was younger and dumber I used to judge and pity stay-at-home moms.
In my early twenties, a colleague resigned to raise her kids fulltime. I remember thinking disdainfully, transporting kids to and from school does not take the whole day. I thought it was a lame excuse to cop out of the “real” world. My youthful, ignorant, arrogance reduced childrearing to transporting kids. Raising children is hard, time-consuming, relentless work. It is no task for two people, let alone one. You need all the help you can get. It really does take a village to raise a child.
Unfortunately villages are not readily available in suburbia. Instead there are lots of shell shocked moms (yes, sometimes dads too. I know I am generalizing but it saves time and column space) who would check into Guantanamo bay if it meant 6 hours uninterrupted sleep between torture sessions. As a black South African of my generation, I have very little regard for the typical nuclear family of mommy, daddy, the kids, and a sprinkle of pets. I grew up in a house with a motley crew of bodies I may or may not have been related to. This meant lots of mommies and daddies to care for me, and cousins to play with, without anyone needing to drive me to a playdate.
You need people – grannies, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, to raise kids without having homicidal or immoral fantasies. I was at the baby clinic the other day and I was shocked to discover that there is something called the Shaken Baby Syndrome. It is a term for head trauma resulting from vigorously shaking a baby. The perpetrator is usually a caregiver who cannot get the baby to stop crying, so they shake the baby out of frustration. It happens. It happens more when you parent singly, and you just never get a break from a demanding, difficult child who cannot express their needs in a way you can decipher.
The village is more readily available to single parents. We all understand that parenting is hard and no one should have to do it alone, so most single parents I know have a wide and robust support system. Alas, few people recognise that being coupled does not protect one from parenting singly. There are plenty of households with two adults, where the bulk of the caregiving falls on just one. This may be for a myriad of reasons, some more acceptable than others. The point is, coupled parents need help too.
If there is a married mom at school who smells vaguely of Vodka and Oros before drink o’clock, offer to take her Things for a playdate, or quietly place a Valium in my palm… I mean her, place a Valium in her palm.
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