I Chose Solo Parenthood
This is why. And spoiler: I love it!
I’m so happy to see you! How to Build a Life is a newsletter by me, bestselling author of 12 books (with two more coming in 2025!) Laura Jane Williams, going out to thousands of readers bang in the thick of life’s mess and mayhem… who are still trying to find the magic. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, and decorate my house like a tart’s boudoir. Those three things are my entire personality 🥰 I really love writing to you here. Hi.
pssst! There’s still spots for my new year writing course available. Over four weeks in Jan and Feb we’ll look at building characters, then writing dialogue, then making these characters who talk do stuff (plot!) and then we’ll put it all together in a final piece that you can send to me for feedback if you like. It’s a great group of people, all done over Zoom, and I am a very fun and relaxed and kind teacher. Would love to have ya!
I talk about the ways in which I raise my kid here quite often, but I haven’t really covered why I became a parent on my own - on purpose - in the first place. But today is that day! Enjoy!
I wasn’t always sure about motherhood, mostly because it seemed to me that mothers get absolutely shafted. My own mother ran the house, and my dad worked. He used to joke that his only expectation was a clean shirt in his wardrobe of a morning, and a hot meal on the table when he got home… but I don’t think it was ever really a joke. My parents’ marriage was as traditional as Don and Betty Draper’s, and far as I remember it was the same for all my friends’ parents too. The dads worked, the mums “just” stayed home.
“Just”. Eurgh.
It wasn’t that staying home was disrespected. But by God I could tell early on that it wasn’t outright respected.
I came of age as The Spice Girls told us about girl power, and I really do mean it when I say this was my first indoctrination into the notion of doing what I wanted to do being far more rewarding than being a liked good girl who followed the rules.
In my teens I thought I wanted to work, to do a badass job and live in a big city and be nothing like my own mother. As an attitude-riddled young ‘un with no concept of mum’s daily sacrifice and devotion, I thought it was lame that she, herself, didn’t “work”, but rather stayed at home and vacuumed. Her own mother had run the family greengrocers, and mum had hated it, she said - her mother was never around. My own mum wanted to be there for us when we got in from school, be the one to make us breakfast and set us up for a good day.
What I failed to understand then, but know to be deeply true now, is that the unpaid labour of the home, and child-rearing, is far harder than going out to work a white collar job. Far, far harder.
(Also, mum I am sorry I wasted so many years not appreciating you in the fullest.)
