Saints for Single Mothers

You Are Not the First to Carry This

Let me say the thing first, plainly, because you probably do not hear it enough.

What you are doing is holy, and it is heavier than almost anyone around you understands.

They see you drop the kids off and think they know your life. They do not know what it is to be the only adult in the house at two in the morning when the fever spikes and there is no one to send to the pharmacy. They do not know what it is to do the math on the groceries again, to sign the permission slip and be the tooth fairy and fix the toilet and hold the crying child and have no one to hand any of it to. They do not know the particular loneliness of making every decision by yourself and lying awake afterward wondering if you got it right. They do not know what it took to leave, or what it cost to be left, or how tired a person can be and still get up and pack the lunches.

You know. And if you are honest, some nights you wonder whether you can keep doing it, whether you are enough for these children, whether anyone will ever really see what it costs you.

Here is what I want you to know, and it is the reason this whole book exists. You are not the first woman to carry this, and you are not carrying it alone.

The Church is full of women who raised their children by themselves, in worse conditions than yours, and came through with their souls intact. Some were widowed young and left with a houseful of children and no money. Some were abandoned by the men who should have stayed. Some fled marriages that were destroying them. Some had their children outside of marriage, in times far less forgiving than ours, and were pointed at in the street. They were not soft, sheltered women in stained glass. They were exhausted, frightened, ordinary mothers who did exactly what you are doing, and the Church did not just remember them. It called them saints.

A young widow buried her husband at twenty-nine, went bankrupt, and raised five children alone in a country that was not her own. A woman abandoned and shamed by a whole town nursed the sick to feed her son and became the patron the Church now gives to mothers in your exact position. A mother prayed for a wayward, faithless son for seventeen years and lived to see him become one of the greatest men in the history of the world. A servant sent alone into the desert with her boy, with a jug of water running out, was found there by God, who told her he had heard the child crying.

These are not tidy stories with the hard parts sanded off. They are field notes from women who held the same weight you hold, and did not break under it.

You do not have to be Catholic to use this book. You do not have to have your faith sorted out, or feel holy, or feel anything but tired. You only have to be a woman raising children mostly or entirely on her own, who could use the company of someone who has been exactly where you are. If that is you, these are your people. They have walked this road. They left directions.

This book is meant to honor the work of raising children on your own, not to add to your load, and it is not a substitute for real help. If you are drowning, if there is not enough money or enough sleep or enough of you to go around, if someone is hurting you or your children, then reaching out to a doctor, a counselor, a trusted friend, a parish, or a shelter is not a failure. It is the same thing you would tell your own child to do. Do it.

Come in. Sit down. Let’s begin.

When You Are Doing It All Alone

The whole weight on one set of shoulders, every decision yours, no one to hand any of it to. Three women who carried a family by themselves and were not crushed.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton

A young widow left with five children and no money, who built a whole life out of the wreckage

Ask her: How do I carry a family completely alone when I have nothing left to lean on?

Elizabeth Ann Seton did not start out as a woman who knew hardship. She was born in New York in 1774 into a respectable, comfortable family, married a successful merchant named William Seton, and had five children in a fine house, the kind of life that looks settled and safe from the outside. And then, over a few brutal years, all of it came apart. Her husband’s business failed completely and the family went bankrupt. William’s health collapsed into tuberculosis. In a desperate attempt to save him, Elizabeth sailed with him and their eldest daughter to Italy, and there, far from home, she watched her husband die, leaving her a widow at twenty-nine with five children to raise and almost nothing to raise them on.

She came home to New York a poor widow, and then made it harder on herself in the eyes of everyone she knew: she became Catholic, which in that time and place meant losing much of the social support and family goodwill she had left, being cut off by relatives and treated as though she had betrayed her own kind. So there she was, a young widow, broke, converted into a suspect minority, with five children looking to her and no husband, no fortune, and few friends to catch her. By every worldly measure she had been stripped of everything a woman of her time was supposed to depend on.

And out of exactly that position, with nothing to lean on, she built. She used the one thing she had, which was her education and her faith, and she started teaching. That work grew into the first Catholic school system in the country and a religious community of women, the Sisters of Charity, dedicated to teaching poor children and caring for the sick and the orphaned. She did all of this while raising her own children, burying two of her daughters along the way, and carrying the ordinary grinding load of a mother with too much to do and too little to do it with. She became, in 1975, the first person born in what is now the United States to be canonized a saint. But hold onto who she was before any of that: a bankrupt young widow with five kids and no one to lean on.

For the single mother carrying a family entirely alone, with no partner to share a single decision and no cushion under her if she falls, Elizabeth Ann Seton is a patron who knew that exact free-fall from the inside. She does not offer you a shortcut, and she would never pretend the weight is not real, because she felt every ounce of it. What she offers is proof, in a real life, that a woman can lose the very things she was told she needed to survive, the husband, the money, the safety net, and not only survive but build something good out of what is left. She did not wait to feel strong or secure before she began. She began scared and poor and alone, with her children beside her, and she used what little she had, and it turned into a life that outlasted her by centuries. You may feel that you have nothing solid under you. She felt that too, and she found that the ground held anyway, and that the small thing she could still do, done faithfully, was enough to start from. You are not standing on nothing. You are standing where she stood, and she is proof that it holds.

The one line to keep: You can lose everything you were told you needed and still build a good life from what is left. Start scared, start poor, start alone, with your children beside you. The ground holds.

Hagar

A woman sent alone into the desert with her child, who discovered that God had seen her all along

Ask her: What do I do when I have been cast out and left to keep my child alive by myself?

Hagar’s story, in the book of Genesis, is one of the oldest accounts we have of a single mother, and it is unflinching about how she got there. She was an Egyptian servant in the household of Abraham and Sarah, a woman with little power over her own life, and she bore Abraham a son, Ishmael. It should have secured her place. Instead it made her a target, and eventually, after tension in the household boiled over, Abraham sent her away. Picture it plainly. A woman is put out of the only home she has, handed a skin of water and some bread, and sent into the wilderness with her young son and no husband, no protector, no plan, and no way back. The provisions do not last. The water runs out under a desert sun, and Hagar does the thing that every mother in this book would understand in her bones: unable to watch her child die, she set the boy down under a bush, walked a little way off so she would not have to see it, and wept.

That is the bottom. A mother alone in a wasteland, out of water, out of options, certain she is about to lose her son and unable to do a single thing about it. There is no husband coming. There is no family stepping in. She has been cast out, and it is just her and the child and the sand.

And then the text says something that has held up mothers for thousands of years. God heard the voice of the boy. An angel called to Hagar and told her not to be afraid, that God had heard the child right where he was, and her eyes were opened and she saw a well of water that had been there all along. She filled the skin and gave the boy a drink, and they lived. Earlier in her story, in an earlier flight into the desert, Hagar had given God a name that no one else in Scripture gives him. She called him El Roi, the God who sees me. She, the cast-out servant, the powerless woman nobody was looking out for, was the one who realized that she was seen.

For the single mother who has been cast out, divorced, abandoned, put out of a home, or simply left to keep her children alive by herself with the provisions running low, Hagar is the oldest companion you have. She does not tell you the desert is not real. She was in it, out of water, at the end of herself. What her story insists on is the thing hardest to believe when you are alone and frightened, which is that you are not actually unseen. The world may have looked away from Hagar. The people who should have protected her did not. And she was seen anyway, heard anyway, provided for anyway, and the water she needed turned out to be closer than her despair had let her see. When you are certain no one sees what you are carrying, when you have set the burden down because you cannot bear to watch it crush you, Hagar is the witness that the God she named is still the God who sees, and that there may be a well within reach that your exhaustion has hidden from you. You are not invisible. She named him for you. He is the God who sees you.

The one line to keep: You have not been cast out of God’s sight, even if you have been cast out of everything else. You are seen, you are heard, and the water may be closer than your exhaustion lets you see.

St. Jane Frances de Chantal

A widow left with four young children who refused to let grief bury her, and raised them well

Ask her: How do I keep going for my children when losing him has left me hollow?

Jane Frances de Chantal was a Frenchwoman of the late sixteenth century, and by her late twenties she had what looked like a good and happy life: a devoted husband, the Baron de Chantal, four surviving young children, and a real love between her and her husband that the records make no secret of. Then, in a single moment, it was gone. Her husband was killed in a hunting accident, shot by a friend who had mistaken him for game. Jane was left a widow in her twenties with four small children, gutted by a grief so severe that she struggled for a long time even to function, plunged into the kind of darkness where getting through an ordinary day feels impossible. She did not experience this as a noble trial. She experienced it as devastation, and she was honest about how long and how hard it hit her.

What makes her a saint and not simply a griefstricken widow is what she did inside that darkness, which was to refuse to let it swallow her children along with her. She had every reason to collapse inward, and part of her wanted to. Instead she kept getting up for those four children. She ran the household, managed the practical wreckage that a sudden death leaves behind, and raised her children with real attention and care through years when her own heart was in pieces. She even had to live for a time under the roof of a difficult, domineering father-in-law, swallowing a great deal for the sake of keeping her children provided for and secure. She did the unglamorous, daily, exhausting work of single motherhood while carrying a wound that never fully closed, and she did it faithfully. Much later, after her children were grown and settled, she would go on to found a religious order and become a saint honored across the Church. But the years that matter most for you are the hard middle years, the widow raising four children while hollowed out by loss.

For the single mother whose aloneness came through death, or through a loss that left her feeling emptied out and unable to imagine going on, Jane de Chantal is a patron who knows that specific hollowness and kept walking through it anyway. She is important precisely because she did not bounce back, did not have some special immunity to grief, did not perform a serenity she did not feel. She fell hard, and stayed down for a while, and still she got up every morning for her children, because they needed a mother and she was the only one they had. She shows that you do not have to feel whole to raise them well. You can be grieving, depleted, going through the motions on the worst days, and still show up, still provide, still love them through your own brokenness, and that showing-up is not a lesser kind of mothering. It may be the bravest kind there is. The hollowness is real, and it does not disqualify you. Get up for them tomorrow the way she did, even hollow, and that will be enough, and one day, further off than you can see right now, the hollow will not be the whole of you.

The one line to keep: You do not have to feel whole to raise them well. Getting up for your children while your own heart is in pieces is not a lesser kind of mothering. It may be the bravest kind there is.