The Question That Haunted My First Year of Single Motherhood

“What’s your support system like?” my doctor asked as I tried to calm my baby. I was at my PCP’s office to get some insight into the persistent elbow pain that was making it difficult for me to open my apartment door or pull the covers over me at night — not to mention feed, hold, and soothe my baby who especially liked to fall asleep in the crook of that injured elbow.

My daughter had arrived six weeks early and needed to be fed in a specific position that required me to hold her head up with my left hand, the weight of her tiny body settling into my joint. But, like a lot of people I encountered in those early days, my doctor was having trouble getting past the single mother thing. “I’m worried about you,” she said, when I made the mistake of mentioning that I wasn’t sleeping. I was worried about me too, but I really needed help with my elbow.

“What’s your support system like?” was the first question almost anyone asked when finding out I was raising a baby without a partner — from potential mom friends at tot gyms to all kinds of medical professionals.

When I was pregnant, I got “what’s your support system like?” from a homeowner who was renting out an upstairs suite in a cohousing community. In cohousing, people usually live in separate houses on shared land, sharing resources. Because buying into a cohousing community can be expensive, I saw renting as a way in for me. But the homeowner balked as we tried to nail down a time for a tour. Instead, she wanted to schedule a call to talk about my support system.

The question was tough for me — it was something I had been asking myself, with some trepidation, since before I had gotten pregnant. Would the life I had made, the seeming haphazard connections collected over the years, be enough to sustain both me and a baby? I didn’t particularly want to get into this with my future landlord or, worse, be evaluated based on my ability to obtain this magic system. I told her that I thought her question was discriminatory (since she was not asking non-parents the same thing), she apologized profusely, and we parted ways.

But the incident jolted me: It was the first of a series of interactions that made me aware that by deciding to have a baby, I had stepped into a role loaded with cultural baggage.

The question about my support system was not about my own trepidations, romantic failures, or giddy hubris in deciding to get pregnant on my own. It was about the asker. “Are you going to need too much from me?” my potential housemate was asking. “Should I pity and worry for you?” my doctor wanted to know. “Can I view you as having agency?” the mom at the tot gym tried to clarify.

“Where do I place you on the scale of superhero to sad sack?” was how the question sounded to me.

“We are seeing the fabric of this country fall apart, and it’s falling apart because of single moms,” Pennsylvania Senate candidate (and future U.S. senator) Rick Santorum said in a speech in 1994. I was a teenager in the 1980s and 1990s when “unwed mothers” were used as cultural (and racial) boogeymen to push through Bill Clinton’s welfare cuts. Single mothers, the rationale went, were a drain on federal resources.

In the intervening years, with the rise of single parents by choice, an alternative narrative has taken hold, one of people who can afford to have babies on their own and are doing just fine. Yet, the words “single mother” remain a powerful cultural and political category that bring up anxieties about the cracks in our social system. And conservatives still seek to punish us, using the flawed logic that this will somehow force people into nuclear family structures.

Single mothers are scary because they are a drain on the state — if they fail by being poor. When they succeed by being able to support themselves, they are scary for a whole other reason: They seem an affront to the idea that women need men.

I straddle these two poles. I am a single mother by choice, not by chance, with all the privilege that comes from a suburban upbringing and an excellent education. When I got pregnant, I had a good middle-class job. By the time my baby was six months old, I’d been laid off, and my search for new work was hampered by the lack of affordable childcare — I languished for close to a year on a waitlist for subsidized care, attempting to apply for jobs during naptimes, when I wasn’t trying to recover from sleeping only a few hours the night before. In other words, I have never met the ideal of a totally self-sufficient, self-supporting mother.

“Are you happy with your choice to become a single mother?” another doctor asked me, five months after my failed attempt to get help for my elbow. I was shopping for a new PCP after mine had left her practice. When I told him I was, he responded, “Oh good, because a lot of women do it and then think ‘oh no, what did I do to myself?’”

I translated his question to: “Do you regret your decision to move forward in life without a male partner?” Or perhaps: “Shall I think of your story as proof that the biases I already have are well-founded?”

But back to my elbow. When my baby was almost two, someone finally paid enough attention to order an X-ray. It turned out I had osteoarthritis.

The problem with these questions is not the questions themselves but how they stop conversations that could actually help me. My PCP failed to order an X-ray or refer me to sports medicine. My potential landlord contributed to me never finding a cohousing community and missing out on the support that could have offered. And the doctor who wanted to know if I regretted my choice alienated me such that it was another year before I found effective medical care.

Midway through my first year of parenting, when the support system question came up, I started responding, “Are you asking because you have resources to offer?” They rarely had what I needed — a way to get more rest without draining my bank account. They mostly couldn’t imagine how that might exist. Generally, when support organizations want to help single mothers, they want to either educate us or listen to our woes, forgetting that perinatal mental health issues often stem from not having enough support at home. But there is no call you can make, no flyer someone can give you, that can alleviate a year of sleep deprivation.

What would it look like to really support single parents? It would be nothing short of a total restructuring of how we do everything in the U.S.: living in small, interconnected communities as humans have for most of our history, sharing labor and valuing an individual’s contributions beyond the financial. And every person, child and adult, would benefit from that. A society like this would not fear need because it would recognize how our children improve the quality of life for all.

In this world, “single” or “partnered” would not be categories of parents but simply life phases that parents might move through as they raise their children.

No baby is meant to be cared for by just one person. No baby is meant to be cared for by just two people. No child is meant to live isolated from their peers and neighbors. Humans evolved to do most things in groups, including raising children. And American parents, single and married, are exhausted precisely because we don’t do that. We live separately and are meant to pull ourselves up when we fall. In other words, we are expected not to need, and when we do, we often question ourselves and our skills, stamina, intelligence.

There’s only one time when the support system question led me towards support rather than away from it. Four years before I had my daughter, I asked my gynecologist if she could tell me what steps I should take to start trying to conceive on my own. She pointed me to a midwives’ clinic in a neighboring town and told me to take folic acid. Then she asked, “Do you have family that can help?” I shook my head, dreading what she’d say next about how hard it would be. She smiled warmly. “You’ll figure it out,” she said. “People figure it out.”

And so I am.