Why The ”˜Single Mom Statistics’ Suck: According To The Numbers, I Should Be A Failure

I was 21-years-old when I got pregnant. My boyfriend and I had not been dating very long. I was a week late in getting my next Depo shot, my birth control method at the time. I assumed everything would be fine, because people normally couldn’t get pregnant in the first couple months off the shot anyways. And then, suddenly, there I was. Pregnant.

My whole word changed in that moment, definitely for the better. But that doesn’t mean that things were easy. I barely had any savings at the time. The gym that I helped manage was starting to bounce my pay checks. I didn’t have any health insurance. The only thing I had going for me was the complete and total support of my amazing family.

In those days, I seemed to fit the “single mother” stereotype perfectly. All of those statistics that people like to throw around to prove that birth before marriage is a death sentence, they would’ve used me as an example.

My daughter’s father and I did not work out. Shocking no one, a relationship without time to develop didn’t get better with the pressures of having a baby. I did manage to get a better job managing a salon, then an even better one managing a business office. My company even paid to send me back to school. My daughter was born and my family helped me pay for the expenses I couldn’t cover. It would take me years to pay my parents back.

In those first few years, I could’ve been the story in the New York Times. When they compared two women who worked together, one a boss and married mother, one an employee and a single mother, they could’ve been talking about my boss and I. She owned her home, I rented. She had a dual-income family, I had one. Her daughter had a dad at home, mine saw her father every couple of weeks for a few hours at a time.

In that story, I was the failure. I was the woman who had her baby out of wedlock, whose life would be sad and miserable. My daughter wouldn’t have been able to afford a good college. She would’ve repeated my sad pattern.

Then, I met my husband. We got married, moved in to our own home, and are living happily ever after or some such fun. I am no longer considered a single mother. My daughter has a man who she calls “Daddy” home every night, helping me read bedtime stories and clean up the kitchen after family dinner. My career has grown past office management and office work all together. We have two incomes, which is obviously helpful.

But are my daughter and I really different people? With one admittedly-magnificent “I Do” in a mountain cabin did I really change the entire trajectory of our lives? And what happens if, God forbid, tragedy strikes and I become a single mother all over again? Where do I fit in there? According to all those reports, the only thing that saved my daughter and I from a very dim existence was the lucky chance that I found a man to marry me, but I refuse to believe that we couldn’t have done it on our own.

These single mother statistics that get thrown around so often use very broad strokes to paint a huge number of individuals, all who have their own stories. Their successes and failures might be impacted by their marriage status, but they aren’t dependent on it. And when we keep harping on percentages and demographics, we lose sight of the actual people that we’re talking about.

According to recent statistics, two-fifths of single mother families fall below the poverty line. By the way, that means that three-fifths don’t. For those children who grow up in the poorest third of America, 58% with two-parent families raised to a higher level, while just 44% of one-parent kids made the jump. Yet, we’re still talking about almost half of the children in the bottom third making their way up the socioeconomic ladder.

I am not pretending that the statistics don’t demonstrate how hard it can be to raise children on one income instead of two. I just don’t think we can look at the percentages alone. Because 44% of the poorest third of America is still a whole lot of people. It’s a huge group of individuals who are succeeding. And yet, we see the children of single mothers as being doomed. By the way, just another statistic, around half of the mothers in this country will be single parents at one point in time or another.

It is worth noting that I have never seen a piece in a major news publication about single fathers, their impact on the economy, or their future prospects. I’ve never heard the story of two men, one married and living with his wife and kids, the other paying child support and seeing his kids every other weekend. We talk a lot about single mothers and why they shouldn’t have spread their legs before marriage. We talk a lot less about the partners who didn’t stick around.

I have been a single mother and I have been a married mother. I never stopped being the same mom. My daughter didn’t change and suddenly become a different person when my husband slipped a ring on my finger. But if you listen to those statistics long enough, apparently marriage is a cure-all for what ails us. It’ll fix income inequality. It’ll bolster economic mobility. We’ll all be better off married.

I’m not knocking marriage. I happen to love it. But every time I hear new single mother statistics, I feel a little defensive. I get angry on behalf of single mothers everywhere, who are more than statistics. They’re more than college graduation rates and income levels. Their children are more than percentage points. They’re people. And they’ll succeed or they’ll fail, but it won’t be determined by a wedding ring. It’s about so much more than that.