File Under: Things that Piss Me Off

Apparently, Dan Quayle was right:  Single mothers are terrible people who have no right raising children.

ENOUGH with the mother bashing, people.  E-freakin-NOUGH!  If we put as much effort into lifting mothers up and celebrating their accomplishments as we do psychoanalyzing their "poor" choices (many of which they don't control), wouldn't everyone benefit?  I'm certainly not saying we should sweep poor parenting under the rug, but WHY aren't fathers as quickly bad mouthed as mothers?  Why is okay for the tech guy from my church, of all places, to tout this anti-mother nonsense on Facebook without countering it with anti-father crap, too?  When was the last time he posted anything pro-parent or pro-family?  Pro-mother?  Not that I remember seeing.

I'm not a single mother.  I wasn't raised by a single mother.  Until my generation, the women in my family were all married before becoming mothers.  But that didn't prevent them from marrying alcoholics who disappeared on a regular basis, beat them, and abused their children.  Stories exist on both sides of my family - written accounts in railroad documents or newspaper articles - going back 100 years or more, giving detailed accounts of absentee fathers and severe spousal abuse.  HOW is that better than being a single mother?  And don't tell me that it's because the father contributed financially.  It's hard to contribute financially when your primary role in life is to be the drunk who falls asleep on the railroad tracks and is killed by a train or the engineer who is so drunk he causes an train accident.  (How ironic is that? One great-grandfather was killed by the same train company that employed the other great-grandfather who cause a major accident.  No idea of the two events were related... but ironic, none the less.  Poor DL&W.)  Come to think of it, I'm one of only two women in our family to NOT marry an alcoholic since this family came here from Ireland in the 1880s!

So please, let's stop the single mom basing, the helicopter mom bashing, the attachment mom basing.  Let's just all agree that motherhood in any form is a challenge and deserves to be respected and supported, despite flawed and imperfect sociological studies.  We're all human and we're all in this together... like it or not.