Eighteen months ago I looked at my husband and said, “I have an idea. What if I return to the United States with our children and start over while you stay here in New Zealand and do what you feel you have to do?” He asked, “Are you okay with that?” I replied, “I am. Are you?” He looked at me and said with the most matter of fact tone, “Yeah, I’m okay with that.” I smiled and said, “Okay, then that’s what we’ll do.” In that moment, I knew exactly where my children and I stood in order of importance in my husband’s list of priorities. There was nothing left to say.
He had lost the job that had motivated us to move to New Zealand in the first place and had done nothing to seek alternative employment opportunities. Any forty-year-old man with two small children has no right thinking he has the luxury not to work. My little income from the local university was not enough to support a family. Our best opportunities were back in the United States where we both had strong professional networks and supportive families. Even without any job prospects he wanted us to stay in New Zealand and depend on the state and our friends there to support us while he figured out his next move. After nine years of partnership, I finally cracked the nut open and found his real person – the greatest disappointment of my life was the man I married. And, trust me when I say, I was not the only one fooled. People used to compare him to Jesus, “You are so blessed he chose you.” Or even better, “I never met a guy like that before. He’s pure goodness.” He had built a very delicate house of cards around his real person and when he lost his job, they came tumbling down and a violent, seething, selfish, manipulative, egomaniac was left standing.
My daughter was three years old and my son was just one year old when we returned home to New York. I did not have any job prospects when I returned. I planned to call up all my past clients and try to get work. The kids and I arrived back to the United States in February just months after the economy crashed with not a dime in our pockets. My father and friend found us a relatively affordable apartment in West Philadelphia to launch our new life. I was terrified. Each night after the kids went to sleep, I literally bounced off the walls filled with rage, fear, panic, disillusionment, and hate. My dad described the severity of my husband’s abandonment best, “It’s like the man left you and the children in the wild in the dead of winter with not even blankets to keep you warm or a book of matches to light a fire. You are like an immigrant in this country – no health care, no residency, no job, no home, no money. You have to build it just like we all did when we came to this country.”
Within three months, I had restarted my consulting business, had four different contracts, and was planning to move back to New York City and really focus on growing my business. One contract turned into an amazing career opportunity that led the kids and I to Los Angeles to start a new life in a new city in an entirely different industry than the one I had worked in for 15 years prior. We were living in Los Angeles two months when my daughter turned to me and said, “Mommy, you are the best happily ever after.”
We heard from their father a few times after we left New Zealand. Pretty common story – after I served him divorce papers, the calls to the children became less frequent and farther apart until months would go by without word. It’s been ten months now since the children have spoken to their father, eighteen since they saw him and twenty since he provided any financial support. I have no idea where he is. All I know is he still receives public benefits from the New Zealand government and he has yet to sign the divorce papers.
A friend asked me the other day, “Are you happy?” I thought about my life, the amazing people I have met, the unconditionally supportive friends I have made; the places where I have traveled, lived and worked; the open way I have loved; and my glorious children…and then, I thought about what I manage and struggle with on a daily basis. I responded, “I am happy, but the exhaustion muffles the joy.” I am a sole parent. Not a single parent with shared custody or child support, a sole parent holding down a household with two small children on one income. I’m also a rising executive in a high profile industry that demands enthusiasm, positivity, and pure creative energy from the people who work in it. With that comes a whole different reality. There is little breathing room in this reality.
As a rising executive, I earn too much to qualify for daycare subsidies and I earn too little to make ends meet. I, along with so many women, fall in between a socioeconomic crack that offers government support (albeit somewhat dehumanizing) to single mothers with little means and absolutely no support for mothers who have a more privileged social status.
At night after the kids go to bed I sit on my balcony and strategize ways to fill that financial shortfall. In the morning, I put on my patent leather pumps and my corporate dress. I drop my kids off at daycare and head to work, transforming the tired expression I know wear into one that exudes confidence, happiness, and excitement. When my CEO asks, “How’s it going?” I always respond, “Fantastic!”
It’s what women like myself have to do if we are to be successful and reach the earning status that will allow us to breathe. We are careful not to let the companies we work for know that we struggle for fear that they will view us as an organizational burden that needs accommodations. We hide the ways we have to piece together the resources to care for our children and develop professionally. We carry leather briefcases, wear the accessories that communicate competency, style our hair and apply make-up in ways that mask how frazzled and strained we might really feel.
You see, we navigate a society where corporate and government policy makers have not yet caught up with the changing household structure. 28 million children live in single parent households in this country. That is the population of Canada and yet, in 1,000 corporations surveyed by the Society of Human Resource Management, only 2% reimburse child care when an employee travels or works late or provides back up care when a child cannot attend daycare due to the thousands of different common and frequent illnesses children catch. In fact, under family benefits, children rank second to last, rising only above pet care. The overwhelming majority of corporations rank hotel upgrades, spa treatments, and movies-on-demand as more important for their traveling executives than childcare reimbursement.
I’ve met women who pull their children out of school when they travel because the only affordable childcare option is an elderly parent or a childcare provider who has no driver’s license. Truth is a sitter who has a driver’s license charges double those who do not. We all have similar “war stories” and we all have that top executive who has been where we are and knows that the “supermom” persona is a performance. Now, don’t get me wrong, we are supermoms. We are dignified and graceful. But, that image sugarcoats and silences the struggle we fight. And, it makes it okay for policies to continue not to acknowledge that there is a need for reform.
Before I became a sole parent, I was that outspoken advocate committed to social change. Every time I think about how I can work to change the antiquated policies that are seemingly benign yet so utterly oppressive, I look around my apartment at the laundry I have to clean, the bills I have to figure out how to pay, the toys I need to disinfect so my kids don’t develop another cold that will keep them home from school, my unfinished dissertation, and I know the only fight I’ve got in me right now is for my children and creating a life where they will have the choices and resources to become as educated, experienced, and worldly as I am. Just as my exhaustion muffles my happiness, it also muffles my drive to make social change happen.
A time will come when I will have the energy and resources to pick up where I left off when I became a sole parent, but right now I’m just trying to get a good night’s sleep to wake up ready to be present with my children and present in my career.
–Photo credit Michael W. May/Flickr