To me, a single mother is someone who has kids, and the father, or fathers, of those kids is/are nowhere to be found. In some cases, the father might also have died, or maybe he's in the service and after the divorce he got stationed somewhere else. Those women don't get any financial assistance from anyone other than maybe their parents or Welfare. Those women don't have a guy around taking the kids for visitation and they never get a day off. Those women have to figure out how to pay for field trips, medical bills, braces, school expenses, food, rent, etc., all by themselves. Those women rely on neighbors and daycare to watch the kids while they're at work. Those women have it hard.
A single mother, these days, can also be someone who just wanted to have a kid and got tired of waiting around for Mr. Right, so they paid a visit to a sperm bank before they were too old to safely bear children naturally. At least in those cases, finances usually aren't an issue, but they never have anyone around on a daily basis to help them out.
A woman who is divorced, on the other hand, is usually just that - divorced. A woman whose ex-husband pays his child support every month and still doesn't want any visitation...well, she's still a single mother, but that's the one exception and at least she gets financial assistance. A woman whose ex plays child support and exercises regular visitation, she's not a single mother. A woman collecting child support and blocking her ex from visitation when he wants it and it's court-ordered, she's a divorced bitch.
Stella loves to refer to herself to her friends, family, and everyone in social-networking-land, as a "single mother of two." I hate that. She's just divorced. Guy takes the kids for visitation every chance he gets, he's always paid his child support (except for two months, two years ago when he was unemployed), and Stella has plenty of help. The fact that she parades herself around as a Martyr for Single Mothers is complete hypocracy and harms all of the truly single mothers out there. She blocks contact between Guy, myself and the kids, to reinforce her single mother self-image. She blocks parenting time so that the kids will feel more distanced from their dad. She badmouths us subtlely to the kids in order to gain some kind of allegiance from them. Little does she know that messing with a kid's mind like that is much more harmful than helpful to all involved.
Of course, in a few weeks Stella is going to have to find some other way to refer to herself and she won't be able to manipulate the kids anymore. Sure, she'll still be at least the "mother of 2" but she'll no longer have custody. :-) Yup, by court order, custody has been changed and the kids will be moving in with Guy and me this summer, permanently! I'll post the details in another entry. What I wonder Stella is going to do is explain why she's got a 3-bedroom house when she'll only have her kids for a little over 2 months every year...
Obviously it's becoming more common for men to win custody of their kids in custody disputes, but from what I've seen, if a parent who used to have primary physical custody loses it, and it's not lost because the situation is changed to equate to more 50/50 time with both parents, then there's something seriously wrong with the losing parent, especially when that parent is the mother. In Stella's case, she lost custody because the judge and the court evaluator saw that she wasn't providing a safe and emotionally healthy environment for the kids and that Guy and I could do better. From here on out, she's going to have a VERY tough time dating because I'm assuming that anyone worthwhile would find out she was the custodial parent for over 2 years after the divorce and then lost to her "meth addict" ex-husband (Guy is not a meth addict, but he did have drug problems before he had kids, and Stella reminds him of his prior shortcomings every stinking chance she gets). I feel for her in that respect. Once you get beyond a certain age, dating can be really, really hard. However, in Stella's case, she's finally learning that you reap what you sow. She was more concerned with the pity that other people felt for her as a single mother than with the well-being of her kids and the fact that she was actively ruining the relationship they had with their dad because that tainted the "poor me" picture she was trying to portray to everyone. Society pities single mothers because they didn't have much of a choice when it came to being thrust into their current situations. Sure, children out of wedlock can be prevented, but not every single mother had kids outside of marriage.
Divorced mothers, on the other hand, had an active part in the divorce process. They got to negotiate for parenting time and child support. They were not thrust into any situation. Sure, they might not have had a choice about getting divorced, but they did have choices to make along the way after the divorce process was started. So to all of you divorced mothers parading as "poor single parents out there," get over yourselves. Your kids still have two actively-involved parents and you're not earning real pity points with anyone.
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