The Woman Behind the Mother

Being a Black single mother will teach you strength in ways you never planned for. Life does not stop because you are tired, disappointed, worried, or trying to figure out your next move. Your children still need you. The bills still come. Work still expects you to show up. Dinner still has to get made. Somehow, you keep moving.

I think when love is placed on your heart as a mother, something changes in you. You become protective. You become resourceful. You learn how to think ahead, make things stretch, and keep your children moving forward even when you are trying to find your own footing. You are raising them, protecting them, teaching them, and preparing them for a world that is not always gentle.

That responsibility can be heavy, but it also brings out something powerful in us.

I look at my own life and sometimes wonder how I managed to do so many things at once. I raised my daughters, worked, handled bills, dealt with disappointment, and still found enough of myself to keep creating. I wrote books. I illustrated. I acted. I filmed a commercial. I created cocktails. I started businesses. I found ways to make bread when bread needed to be made.

That is the part people do not always see.

They see the finished product. They see the picture, the event, the business, the book, or the commercial. They do not always see everything that had to happen before you got there. They do not see the schedule you had to work around, the money you had to stretch, the calls you had to make, or how tired you were when you still decided to show up.

There are so many Black single mothers living that same kind of life. Maybe our stories are different, but the feeling is familiar. We work. We raise children. We help with homework. We take care of family. We start businesses. We go back to school. We create. We start over. We learn how to make something happen even when we do not have everything we need.

Sometimes we are building our dreams in between everything else.

That might mean answering an email in the car, writing after everyone goes to sleep, taking an audition when your schedule is already full, or starting a business while you are still working another job. It might mean trying something again after it did not work the first time. It might simply mean reminding yourself that being somebody’s mother did not erase the person you were before motherhood.

That is something I have had to remember for myself.

I am a mother, but I am also still a woman with ideas. I still want to write. I still want to act. I still want to create. I still want to build businesses and see how far my gifts can take me. Wanting something for myself does not take away from how much I love my daughters.

If anything, I want them to see that part of me.

I want them to see me try things. I want them to see me take chances and learn something new. I want them to see that disappointment does not have to be the end of the story. I want them to know that even when life changes the route, you can still keep moving toward something that belongs to you.

Black single mothers are often expected to be strong all the time, but strength does not mean we never get tired. It does not mean we never need help. It does not mean we always know what we are doing. Sometimes we are figuring it out while everybody else is depending on us.

We are human too.

We can be grateful for our children and still need a break. We can love being mothers and still want careers, businesses, creativity, travel, rest, relationships, and lives that belong to us too. We can be proud of how far we have come and still want more.

There is nothing wrong with that.

So this is for the Black single mothers who are still building while carrying more than most people will ever see. It is for the women who are working, creating, raising children, starting over, learning, healing, and still trying to make room for themselves somewhere in the middle of it all.

Life does not always give us the softest path. Sometimes we have had to become strong before we were ready. Sometimes we have had to figure things out without enough help, without enough money, or without enough rest. Even in those moments, we still find a way to move forward.

That is what I want my daughters to remember about me. I do not need them to think I did everything perfectly. I want them to remember that I kept going, that I kept creating, and that I kept believing there was still more life for me to live even while I was pouring so much of myself into them.

I hope other Black single mothers remember that too. We are allowed to be proud of everything we have carried, but we are also allowed to look forward to the things we have not built yet. We are still becoming who we are meant to be. We are still creating, still dreaming, and still making a way for ourselves and for our children.

Maybe that is where the real strength is. It is not in never getting tired or never needing help. It is in knowing that after everything life has asked of us, there is still a part of us that believes there is more ahead.

I know there is more ahead for me.

I am not finished yet.