Confessions of an Urban Single Mom … Mommy’s Little Girl

If ever I should co-conspire with God again and my womb sprouts forth a girl child, I always knew that I would bless her with a non-conformist name. A name that is neither male nor female. A name that is not related to any religious or cultural heritage, and a name that conjures up no specific image at any given time.

A name that would not box her in, bind her to a specific time and place, limit her dreams or dictate her actions.

A name that simply is.

So that she could simply be. So that she could simply be the product of everything I had to learn to be, about being a woman, without doubting or second guessing herself about whether or not it was OK for her to be the sum of her mother’s knowledge.

Knowing full well that my Little Girl and I will have very little common ground to connect over, her name will be my own personal legacy to her.

She will be a girl child in an age where the girl children before her like me, my mother, my grandmother and my grandmother’s mother had to battle with and grapple and wrestle around with ideologies like feminism. Equality of the sexes. Female emancipation. Women’s liberation.

These are all thoughts, theories and ideologies that ring true to me as the Urban Single Mom. By the very virtue of our realities as single mothers we are, whether or not by our own choosing, feminists. We are both male and female, on equal frequency, every day, all day long. Will they still ring true for my baby girl?

In a decade or two from now? I doubt it.

The trail has been blazed for her by women like me. And by women like my closest female friends.

“You’re looking at him, kid.” That’s what The Black Panther, my female bestie and fellow single mommy, said to one of her baby boys not so long ago on his birthday when he came leaping into her bedroom looked up at her and asked with all the wide eyed naivety of an energetic, inquisitive toddler “where is my Daddy?”

No remorse. No resentment. No drama. Just a true, factual, and quirky answer to one of life’s most painful questions.

Single mothers like The Black Panther had our trail blazed by our own mother’s, aunts, teachers and female bosses. They battled ‘the battle of the sexes’ so that we could live a life where it was absolutely normal to consider ourselves both male and female simultaneously. Now in the year 2015, we are in fact ‘sexless’ and have been so since taking up the challenge of single parenthood.

We do not wonder whether women can do anything a man can; we know it to be so because we are so, every day of our lives. But it doesn’t end there.

We also do not wonder whether a man can do anything a woman can because we have seen that as well.

The only thing we now wonder about occasionally is when the world’s collective consciousness will evolve to the extent that as a woman or as a man, you can be anything, but you can be able to choose to not be, without fear of prejudice and judgement.

Yes, my darling future little girl, you can do anything a man can. You are equally smart, equally strong and equally resilient.

This world does not have to be a man’s world. That is the gift the women before you have bestowed upon you. But truth be told, my biggest hope for any girl child, my future one included, is that they can choose to be just women too.

My hope is that the wars they rage are by choice and not requirement.

– urbansinglemom@gmail.com

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