The Whole Sky

An Ode to Single Mothers

Sometimes I forget…

Thrown off my centre by societies projections, of what it means to be a Single Mother… I forget… that the liberation that has come with choosing this path for myself.

Not that I chose it, entirely.

I mean, some part of me did. My soul knew the journey it was embarking on. However it did not FEEL like I chose it, when it was all unfolding within the throws of mess and early matrescence.

But now, having burst out of that early postpartum haze, I can see why I chose to walk this path. Lonely at times, sure. Harder than anything I could possibly imagine, sure.

However, there is actually also a sense of freedom in this path (for me, anyway) that is often not spoken about so much, publicly.

The kind that lives in the silence after your child falls asleep — when the house is yours, the decisions are yours, the direction of the life you are building belongs entirely to you.

But single motherhood, for those of us who have chosen it or grown into it or been cracked open by it into something we never expected to become — it is not the lesser thing. It is not the consolation prize.

It is the whole sky.

I know what you have been told.

That a family needs a particular shape to be real. That love requires a witness of a certain kind. That your child is missing something — some warmth, some anchor, some word that only another adult can provide.

I want to ask you: missing compared to what?

Compared to a household held together by the quiet performance of two people who have long since stopped seeing each other? Compared to a table where the air is thick with what cannot be said?

Your child is not missing anything. Your child is watching you be free.

And sure, I have moments where I break down. Where I need to be held. Where I struggle and long for the idealistic “happy family” narrative. And then I witness Mother’s who are dependent on their partners — or that have to run every decision by them and I think “no thankyou”.

There is a sovereignty that comes when you stop negotiating your life with someone who is not you.

When you cook what you want. When you take the trip. When you raise your daughter according to the values that live in your own bones — not diluted, not compromised, not routed through the approval of someone who sees the world differently.

And sure, I am a Single Parent, but I am also a part of a blended family — one full of colour, of flavours so rich that a nuclear family could not provide.

It does not work for everyone. It is not everyone’s path. However it was my own — and it is the path of many Mothers.

Single Motherhood can look like mothering from wholeness.

A woman who knows what she wants, and moves toward it — this is not deprivation. This is the most radical thing a child can witness.

Single mothers built civilisations.

They held land, raised sons into men and daughters into forces of nature, kept the knowledge, carried the lineage. They were called widows and spinsters and unfortunate and brave. They were called strong like it was an apology.

I am not calling you strong as an apology.

I am calling you complete.

To the mothers doing it alone on Mother’s Day:

You are not half of something. You are not waiting. You are not a before-picture.

Your home is not broken. It is whole in a different geometry.

The love in it does not divide by two — it multiplies, undiluted, unsplit, moving in one clear direction: toward your child, toward yourself, toward the life you are actually living instead of the one you were supposed to want.

The stigma belongs to a world that was never built for your kind of courage.

Leave it there.

Come into your life.

The whole sky is yours.

Happy Mother's Day.

With Love,

Sigourney Belle x