All the Single Mothers!
(All the single mothers)
I want to be a Single Mother. I want all of us to be Single Mothers. I feel entitled to the fantasy of punching a number of men from my past in the face; at least one woman. If you were a Single Mother, it would be enough to know that you were a Single Mother to deal the blow. Hit the spiritual gut of all those for whom she has been an incubator. I want to be a Single Mother whose life was totally ruined by love alone. The weak toddler yips of toy dogs nagging the heart is not enough. The deal should change a Single Mother on a molecular level.
My regrets should be full of laughter. People should enjoy hearing me sigh. The anonymous public should struggle, really struggle, with negotiating between pity and horror when they see me walking down the street with children alone.
If straight men were never going to be excited by all things yonic, no… (why am I circumlocuting?) If heterophile cismen were never ever going to fall in line, to be in complete awe of the full blown vaginal anyway, I wish I had also rebuked the phallus, the churlish, the penile. If I had a nickel for every time a man refused to eat pussy, I would thrive as a Single Mother. I want to be the Single Mother who flaunts curtains that don’t match the drapes, whose putrid meaty labial colors spread like a fungus over the minds that fall upon it. I want to smoke so many cigarettes after. Only children come out of this body. No one will ever return.
When failure people—mostly men, some women—cheer for the mother who makes it work, stays in the crucible of the straight partnership, I want to be the Single Mother even more. One whom no one wants to hear from. When the Single Mother drives through her child’s pickup from school, hastily punching hazard lights and eyeballing the other child, another child, and another child, and another child…She can see all of the children of the world, and if they could all become her charge, I want all of the other parents in good standing with their plastic subscriptions to despair that they are not Single Mothers. The Single Mother pronounces names correctly and feeds herself at the same time as her children. The Single Mother is the only natural enemy of all evil men of the state, and has to be the first one to punch them in the face, too.
Jobs make us Married Women. Careers make us Single Mothers. I want to follow my calling to the end of the relationship I hold with all known partners. The Single Mother doesn’t need a divorce. She is just Single. She is connected and disconnected from all life. The Single Mother makes Jainism look like a Planet Fitness membership. The Single Mother doesn’t have to have life-work balance. She is the center of the universe. She is the only reason any of us are alive.
