Saints for Single Mothers

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.