A Single Mom’s Feminist Reflections on Relationships, Mental Health, and the New Year

Today is New Year's Eve. It's a complicated day for everyone. For me, it's not only my ex-boyfriend's birthday (more on him later) but what would have been my three-year anniversary with my child's father. Cool. Oh shit, also, I'm living in my parent's basement with my 20-month-old daughter, wearing near black lipstick, dressed up in goth chic for no one in particular except Taylor Swift, as she is currently sashaying across my TV screen. You know T. Swift is having a bomb ass NYE. Me, well I don't lament not being at some party or with some dude or whatever. I'm cool with this 7up and Korbel.

But ya know what I hate? How at the end of the year there is always this onslaught of think pieces reflecting on the year and how to make the next one like, super great! They get posted all over your feeds and timelines, usually in the form of a bullet list from Thought Catalog* and it's just a bunch of bullshit to me: "Here's 10 Ways You Can Learn to Let Go in 2019;" "Five Steps to Love Yourself First Before Anyone Will Truly Love You Back;" "Pick Up the Broken Pieces and Come out a Warrior Next Year;" "2018 Sucked: In 2019 Use Gratitude, Self-Care, and Forgiveness to Find Inner Peace." Gag. 

It's all the same trite, regurgitated advice; but the concepts feel like mere abstractions unable to be touched and just out of reach for any solid praxis to lead a life worth living. News flash: it DOESN'T always get better for everyone, at least not in the way people want you to think. I've pretty much held the same baseline of depression my entire life. I get shit done and I'm high functioning but it's not the way I would choose to be by any means. Add to that I am now a single mom and the sole caretaker of my daughter, and let's just say I struggled this year in ways I never knew imaginable. Kids-amirite??

Life was definitely intent on fucking us over no matter what. I personally felt spiritually bankrupt the whole year. I exited my toxic relationship with my child's father. I had no support for my daughter, so I bit the bullet to move back home to try and figure out how to survive as a single mom. I'm still here and things I've figured out are around zero. 

You can probably tell that relationships played a huge role for me this year, and not really a good one. I was so accustomed to being in a relationship that suddenly realizing I didn’t have that security made my instincts go into overdrive, feeling the need to latch on to someone to ease this discomfort I was feeling. This is not a great idea. And I also recognize that dating a single mother can present some unique challenges. 

But perhaps my symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) can help explain this relationship cycle that was so embarrassingly repetitive. It was like a merry-go-round of chaos I invited through my dating choices but felt powerless to slam on the emergency breaks. I had a string of intense relationships back to back (like I'm on the cover of Lethal Weapon/like I'm Jordan '96, '97). They ended in devastation. I actually went into an intensive outpatient treatment program for a week at a hospital in the middle of this year to deal with some of it. You can read about most of what happened leading to that here if you're into schadenfreude and the like. 

So one creepy lesson I did learn this year? 

When it comes to relationships, you are dating your mom or dad. Or both. 

For example, my dad is a recovering alcoholic, 15 years sober, AA sponsor, yadda yadda yadda. 

Like basically the poster child for what a recovering addict should look like. And even as a kid, it was not horrible or anything to live with my dad. There are so many good memories and in general, I had a pretty good childhood thanks to my parents. However, that's not the criteria for whether a child is affected by the alcoholic parent; simply having one can lead to a bunch of issues. And it is very likely that you will seek out relationships of people that are addicts or have addict-like personalities. (Did I mention it was a merry-go-round of mostly alcoholics and emotionally unavailable men?)

So, the ushering in of New Year joy-marketed as an opiate for the heartbroken-just feels like there is more trouble ahead to me. The more I try to love myself outside of having a partner, and get my shit together, and be a good mom, the more roadblocks I encounter. I am inundated with advice like the aforementioned articles. Even if many of these suggestions are valid, I can't deliver because I’m running on fumes, but the only tool I have left is sheer willpower. The myth of willpower is that individuals need to dig deep to become motivated to perform. However, numerous studies indicate willpower is a finite resource that depletes itself overtime- kind of like a diminishing law of returns. (Here's what the APA says on willpower for further reading). 

The only authentic "advice" towards feeling better, especially when recovering from mental health struggles, that resonates anymore with me is this: you are the only one that knows how to get you better. Sometimes it's better to stop scouring the mommy blogs and doing the DBT workbooks and the CBT exercises and the inner child work (etc. etc. etc.)  and see if the answers come more naturally. Andrew Matthews proclaims you've probably already heard the particular advice you need, you just have to stop looking for it. And there simply just isn’t a blanket approach to fixing problems. The infinite number of variables contextualizing an individual’s circumstances necessitates different approaches for everyone. 

Side note: Check Matthews out. I know he reads corny but exploring his works are like entering this delightfully cheerful winter wonderland with soft, powdered tidbits sprinkled all over, each one giving you a simple bit of knowledge.

So anyway, the first year of being a single mom- well, difficult is an understatement. It fucking sucked, guys. It seemed everyone had a shitty year, too. Wtf happened? Did life just decide to condense all its' chaos into a year of absolute absurdity? Was life just sitting back, legs kicked up on the couch, cracking open wine spritzers month after month to gawk at us idiots as we clumsily scampered around for clues on how to deal with all the Mercury Retrogrades and Donald Trumps and Nazis and sexism and full moons and whatever else? 

Cracking jokes as ex-lovers came to haunt and taunt us? Laughing as we tried to scoop out the psychological tumors we’d grown through hardships using intellectualization? Writing theses on the loneliness of being ghosted and how it's a greater reflection of the collective internal homelessness modern technology has cursed us with?

It seemed like it. Speaking of being haunted and ghosting, the biggest upheaval this year was one of those complete left field situations, one of those "this will NEVER happen to me" occurrences that is actually still keeping me up at night. My first real love, who put me through hell after our breakup, contacted me; he wanted to apologize. He said everything I needed to hear him say, albeit years ago. I was shocked. He validated all of those feelings I had back then- that it wasn't my fault, and there wasn't something wrong with me. But the message also had this tone of like, needing me to forgive him but also to listen to him. He told me how unhappy he was in his relationship and was worried about being alone forever. Already going through this year of seriously traumatic romances, hearing someone I once loved telling me such musings, like how he saw me on our first date and it was love at first sight, and he won't ever love anyone as he loved me. He even told me that he SAW MY FACE IN THE SKY one night recently and "something in the universe changed" so he contacted me.

Now, I haven't thought about big homie in years. I moved on, had a kid. Yeah, my relationship didn't work out with my baby daddy, but I put in MAD effort to get over this ex-so much self-help, healing, and closure was involved, and I did it all on my own. (I even published a vlog about how to heal from a breakup while simultaneously coping with a mental health struggle. You can check it out here). So, for him to come back years later to apologize it really shook me up. Apologies this late in the game are usually for the other person to assuage their own guilt; not to heal the recipient. 

During one correspondence we talked about forging a new friendship. He was going out of town and told me he'd "text me immediately" when he landed...

...which he did. We shared a few texts and then he kind of slowly stopped responding and reaching out. The messages progressively got less deep and more superficial, like did you watch The Voice last night shit. After a couple months, I stopped hearing from him. Now, I know what you're going to say- I still have feelings for him. And maybe that's true, even though I don't find someone who treats me this poorly as attractive. Nostalgia, perhaps. But you know, I have to admit, his correspondence really seemed much deeper than "hey, I'm sorry." So it was equally shocking he was in a relationship and saying these things. It was difficult to understand when I didn't hear from him the rest of the year so yeah, I'll admit it, I did what we ALL do and facebooked a little. Just like a tiny thumbnail pic for one second, but it was enough to see him on vacation in Europe with his girlfriend. 

I still am torn between having these weird confusing feelings come up with a deep resentment that he came back around, digging through the proverbial garden of my life, plucking up roots almost indistinctly, eventually leaving me with only weeds. There are two options to explain his behavior: 1) he is so dense he literally doesn't recognize his behavior as problematic; or, 2) he realizes he was using me while he went through a rough patch in his life and relationship, and when things turned around/ he got bored/ whatever he left again. Neither one sits well with me.  

And that’s the second lesson I really learned this year, especially experiencing first-hand the way our society treats mothers as well as the gender disparity in providing emotional support:
There will always be an expectation by men that any woman in their life should and will perform emotional labor to help process their feelings at any time they need. 
(Reason 1,252 why feminism is important). 
(A lot of Reddit fuckboys disparagingly joked about what the term emotional labor meant. This article sums it up pretty well). 

I would love to end this with, hey: I'm gonna kick all the fuckboys to the curb this year; I'm gonna stop expecting reciprocal treatment with men I am romantically entangled with; I'm gonna meditate and get in the best shape of my life, be supermom, do yoga, be happy...But you know what? Next year is gonna be just like this one: up and down, but probably filled with more heavy destructive waves than most others experience. That's the BPD/ depression/ anxiety, but hey.

I do wanna put this out in the universe though, because there's been so much unsaid for me: It's not ok to treat me like shit. I'm a prize, flaws and all. And my comeback game is INSANE. I used to weigh over 200 pounds, sweetie. I successfully quit SMOKING…I GREW A CHILD AND THEN BIRTHED HER. I WILL glow up in 2019 even if I'm still a single-mom sitting in her basement listening to The Cranberries. Because I have grit, and that means eventually I’ll have a pearl. Xoxo Happy NY

 

*I've literally posted something like this on TC